Category Archives: Straining Pulp

Improvised Contraband Prison Pulp Strainer #23: “Cellmate” by Theodore Sturgeon, Weird Tales v. 39, n.9, January 1947

Straining the Pulp (with forgotten super-science) #22: “Keepersmith” by Randall Garrett & Vicki Ann Heydron, Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine v.1 n.2 1979

The Pulp? Strained. #21 “The World Well Lost” by Theodore Sturgeon, Universe V.1 no. 1, June 1953

Running down the clock here in August, and with those crisp mid-90-degree days starting to show up it’s feeling like we’ll be in spooky season soon enough; but before we return to weird horror, I want to dive into some some pulp sci-fi. So, for this, our twenty first edition of Straining the Pulp, let’s take a look at a true foundational classic from one of the genre’s greats: “The World Well Lost” by Theodore Sturgeon from the very first issue of Universe Science Fiction dated June, 1953.

Now, as is custom around here, I want everybody to take a minute, click on that link, and go read the story. It’s not too long and I think you’ll get a lot more out of it if you go into my meandering musings with it rattling around in your skull. It’s an important story in the history of sci-fi, so don’t deny yourself the pleasure of experiencing it as the readers of 1953 would have come across it! Okay?

I said above that Sturgeon was one of the genre’s “greats,” which you might find surprising if you’re not steeped in pulp literature – he was never a huge seller, never had much critical success or even outside recognition, and was published mostly in second-string magazines. But, among sci-fi writers of that and later eras, Sturgeon is one of those artistic darlings whose works were considered some of the most important and influential ever published. He’s similar to Al Bester or, later on, Gene Wolfe – powerful writers whose influence far outstripped their financial success. He was a huge influence of Samuel R. Delany and Harlan Ellison, for example, two writers who pushed the boundaries of science fiction in ways that are instantly recognizable as a part of Sturgeon’s legacy.

He’s also famous as the inspiration for Vonnegut’s character “Kilgore Trout,” a soulful if shabby genius whose writing was always trapped in porn mags or z-tier pulps. Sturgeon got to know Vonnegut when both were living in the same town in Massachusetts; this was before Vonnegut was “Vonnegut” mind you, and it’s quite telling that Sturgeon (and his circumstances) made such a strong impression on ol’ Kurt that he was immortalized as one of the great characters of 20th century literature.

Sturgeon was fairly prolific, although there were some long fallow periods where he suffered from apparently debilitating writer’s block. His most famous work is, probably, “Baby Is Three” from Galaxy in 1952, although you might also know him from “Killdozer!” a story a million times better than its premise has any right to be (something true for the later made-for-TV movie based on it, by the way). He wrote some famous Star Trek episodes, “Shore Leave” and “Amok Time,” the story where the emotionless and logical Mr. Spock gets so horny he loses his goddamn mind and attempts to kill Kirk.

Sex, gender, and their role in the way society is constructed and enforced are common topics in both Sturgeon’s writing and his life. You want to be careful with labels, because they can have political or social valences today that people in the past would never have subscribed to, but Sturgeon was a queer writer – he was married to a woman with whom he had numerous children, but he also liked to have sex with men. This fact is relevant to our story in particular today, since it’s often called the first “modern” gay sci-fi story.

A quick look at the cover of this magazine shows that everyone was well aware of the boundary-pushin’ nature of Sturgeon’s story, which they specifically call out as his “Most Daring Story” to date! Samuel R. Delany has, in a couple of interviews, brought up the fact that Sturgeon’s first attempt to get this story published resulted in the editor of that magazine not only rejecting it, but in calling around to OTHER editors to basically blacklist Sturgeon and keep him from publishing it ANYWHERE. This didn’t stop the editor of Universe Science Fiction, “George Bell” who was actually a name shared by Ray Palmer and Bea Mahaffey. Palmer is a hugely interesting and important figure, far to huge of a subject to get into now, but, sufficed to say, that the iconoclastic and publicity-loving Palmer accepted this story is not too surprising. (Bea Mahaffey is likewise a very interesting and important figure in the history of sci-fi…we’ll ALSO have to come back to her one of these days!)

But enough! Let’s dive in to the story already, yeesh!

A nice, bucolic scene, rolling hills a distant town’s battlements…nothing too surprising or interesting here on the first page…but…on the adjoining page, we come across something much more striking:

A striking image, and one that’s even more straightforwardly queer than the story, initially! These are the two “loverbirds” of course, but in this image there’s very little ambiguity, whereas the story plays a little coy with it, at least for a while.

The story starts with a discussion of the arrival of the “loverbirds” as something that’s done and overwith – it’s happened already, and their brief stay of nine days is already in the past. There’s some fun, classic Sturgeon world building going on – Earth is a both paradisiacal and shallow, a world dominated by “orgasmic tri-deo shows” and other such fantastic modes of consumption and experience. But still, there’s something wild and special about these two beings, the “loverbirds” who have arrived on Earth.

So, these two enigmatic beings arrive on Earth, dissolve their ship, and become this sensation across the whole world, largely because there’s a kind of magical intensity to them and their obviously profound love for one another. Like I said, in the story, there’s very little to indicate what these beings look like – the bird metaphors up front convey a kind of delicate beauty, but importantly there’s no explicit gendering of either of the aliens. There’s simply a “tall one” and, therefore, a short one. A reader in 1953 might simply assume a standard, heteronormative pair, a boy alien and a girl alien, although they might’ve wondered at the illustration.

Anyway, these intensely lovey-dovey aliens are a huge sensation on Earth, of course, which leads to the authorities becoming interested in them, as well as any uses or dangers they might present. So they feed all the relevant data about the loverbirds into a big ol’ supercomputer, and what do they get? The electronic brain spits out a single word: “Dirbanu.”

Dirbanu, we’re quickly informed, is an intensely enigmatic world, one of the few that Earth had been unable to have any contact with – whenever they try, they’re rebuffed, and the Dirbanuvian defenses are impenetrable and perfect. Earth realizes that these aliens must be mysterious travelers from Dirbanu! And, because of the sheer volume of Loverbird media being beamed out into space, Dirbanu becomes aware that these two have arrived on Earth…and they demand the return of these two fugitives!

Great, fun writing from Sturgeon again; I especially like the realpolitik that he’s explaining in the asides here. It’s also a great and cynical switcheroo – we started with this ideal couple who have captured the world’s imagination, symbols of beauty and wonder, profound in their love…and then these refugees get locked up and shipped out because there’s a political advantage to be had from returning them to the world they fled from. Grim stuff!

The story shifts to the hastily organized prison ship, the Starmire 439, and we’re introduced to its two-man crew: Rootes, a small, cocky little feller who is the Captain of the expedition, and the sole crewman, a hulking, meditative, and shockingly literary man who goes by the name of Grunty. A real odd couple, it turns out that these two only ever ship out with one another – indeed, neither could actually function with anyone else:

So, despite being extremely weird guys, these two work so well together that they’re basically the best spacemen in the business – no other crew can handle the difficulties of long distance space travel like Rootes and Grunty, who even seem to, in some strange way, thrive in each other’s company. So in synch are these two, in fact, that they always and predictably react the same way to the FTL super-science engine of the ship: Rootes konks out for 2 hours under the influence of superluminal travel, while Grunty is up after a scant thirty minutes.

I imagine most people would already at least have gotten an inkling of what’s going on here – the idea that these two are so smoothly in simpatico is one thing, but that of the two only bookish contemplative Grunty knows what the bond is between them (and that it CANNOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCE be communicated to Rootes) kind of heavily underlines it. Still, it’s 2024 and maybe we’re all used to these sorts of things in a way that the readers of 1953 weren’t!

Anyway, Sturgeon gives us some great scenes aboard the ship, with Rootes wearyingly recounting his latest sexual conquest back in port to a resigned Grunty. Its fun, and we get further glimpses of Grunty’s interior life when he goes over to check on the two prisoners:

Yup, turns out these here aliens are PSYCHIC…and that’s a real problem for Grunty…

Very little room left for doubt about what Grunty’s secret is, but it’s still being left unsaid, a elision left for the reader to fill in. Regardless, we’re given a sense of Grunty’s animal panic at having his quiet, secure, secret inner self suddenly exposed. Grunty soon comes to hate the loverbirds, even neglecting to feed them until Rootes, recognizing something is wrong, harangues him into doing the bare minimum of upkeep for the prisoners. Grunty’s fear apparently is that the loverbirds, possessing his secret, would inevitably communicate it to others when they get to Dirbanu, and from there it would, doubtless, spread back to Earth. This is kind of a wild, crazy idea though, and it seems that Grunty’s secret is so profound, and its exposure so terrible, that he’s kind of lost his mind a bit here. There’s a great section, after Grunty gives Rootes an art book to ogle, where he’s mulling over the fact that there are still certain things considered taboo and forbidden, even on so free-wheeling a world as Earth, and how it took half-a-lifetime for Grunty to discover a way of life that afforded him some freedom (even if it is only for the brief moments of solitude afforded him by the superluminal blackouts). He cannot afford to even consider what the loss of this fragile freedom would mean for him, and so he comes to the conclusion that there’s only one way out for him: Grunty has to kill the Loverbirds.

The “How” of his murder puzzles him for a bit – he’s got to kill these aliens, but how to do it in a way that wouldn’t cause trouble for him and, particularly, Rootes. He can’t just smash their heads in, and there’s no way to poison them…but then Grunty, with his keen insight into human psychology, realizes that a sawed-off little popinjay like Rootes would have to have a gun somewhere. Sure enough, he’s got some kind of murderous death ray stashed in his stuff. And so Grunty gets it and, while Rootes is still under FTL coma, prepares to protect his secret by blasting the aliens.

But, just as he’s about to pull the trigger, the aliens show him some pictures that they’ve drawn. The first picture shows, with startling clarity and precision, Grunty and Rootes and a girl. The second picture is of the same three, but naked (Grunty wonders how they learned about human anatomy). Then a third picture shows the two loverbirds flanking a strange, round, little critter. And the fourth picture?

The scene closes, and we start up with Rootes, waking from his superluminal torpor to find Grunty standing solemnly over him. He soon learns that the loverbirds are gone, having taken the ship’s life boat and vanished into space. When he asks how it happened, Grunty admits to him that he let them go. At first Rootes is enraged, furious that he’s gotten them in such trouble. But, slowly, he learns that A) the two escapees have no intention of traveling to Dirbanu and B) Grunty is planning on simply lying to the Dirbanuvians that the two loverbirds died – it seems that they isolationists of Dirbanu don’t have any ships to check on the claim anyway. But why, asks Rootes? In answer, Grunty shows him the pictures the loverbirds drew.

Rootes comes to the conclusion that Grunty helped the loverbirds escape because he didn’t want Rootes to get in trouble for killing a pair of gay aliens, like any red-blooded human man certainly would, especially one so profoundly and deeply and sincerely heterosexual as Rootes. Yessir, he was just looking out for his buddy, good ol’ Grunty.

Rootes homophobia, presumably a typical expression of the status quo back on Earth (and a part of what Grunty had been fleeing from) is one-up’d by the Dirbanuvians who, when contacted, seem appreciative of the fact that the the humans did ’em a solid by killing the deviants. Of course, politically, nothing has changed – like Rootes said, the deep loathing for homosexuality that underpins Dirbanu culture is so strong that they can’t stand to even think about Earth, with its too-similar genders making them all uncomfortable as suchlike. Nothing to do but head home!

And that’s the end of “The World Well Lost” by Theodore Sturgeon.

I mean, it’s a hell of an ending for a hell of a story, isn’t it? Meditative, sad, but still a bit hopeful. The virulence of homophobia is really well portrayed – in Rootes’s outsized performative heterosexuality and in his insistent regurgitation of standard homophobic slurs and ideas, he comes across as a tragically repressed closet case, someone who thinks that if he’s to survive in the world, he has to bury himself completely in order to conform. And Grunty, facing a similar set of circumstances, has found a way of life barely any better – escaping the hateful Earth by living in space, unable to express himself to the man he loves except for in those brief moments of space-travel-induced blackouts. It’s tragic stuff, but I think its saved from rank maudlin-ness by the fact that Sturgeon is such a deft and controlled writer who, even when dealing with complex and difficult subjects, is still able to construct a plot and characters and story that moves you along irresistibly.

I think it’s a testament to the pulps that a story like this was (eventually) published in 1953. It’s very easy to dismiss these magazines as cheap and disposable entertainment (nevermind the fact that 35 cents in ’53 wasn’t exactly nothin’) but there’s more to them than trashy ray-gun stories. Because of their marginality, marginal writers could (and sometimes did) find homes for stories in them that otherwise might never have seen the light of day. And while it is true that there’s a lot of reactionary bullshit in them (and overt racism, sexism, etc) there’re also stories by authors whose identities would not have fit comfortably in the world at large back then (or now, sadly).

Also, frankly, there’re some real good writing in them too. Sturgeon is a great writer, and there’re some stirring and striking passages in this story, aren’t there? Real lyricism comes through here, I mean at the sentence level, without even considering the topic or themes. There’re some recent collections of Sturgeon’s work, multivolume affairs that publish his stories and novels, that’re worth hunting up. I think his position in the history of SF is important, too – like I said earlier, he’s the foundation of what would, eventually, become the vibrant New Wave sci-fi of the 60s and 70s, in large part because he tackled complex subjects with real style and insight.

Now, I wouldn’t blame you if you felt that there’s a whiff of the “tragic queer” about this story – it’s certainly true that this story is underpinned by the melancholy of oppression. But, to that point, this was written in the fuckin’ 50s man…and as bad as homophobia is now, I think it’s worth appreciating the position back then. Just tackling the topic in the first place, let alone with the tenderness and care that Sturgeon is taking here, is remarkable.

Finally, themes and such aside, I’ll just come back around and say that Sturgeon is a great writer, one of the best of his generation in the genre, certainly. He’s worth your time, is all I’ll say!

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

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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!

Strainers of the Pulp #19, Three Kings’ Day edition: “Worms of the Earth” by Robert E. Howard, Weird Tales, Nov. 1932, v.20 n.5

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We’ve drained the mead horns, reduced the great roast boar to gnawed bones, and watched the vast bonfire around which we defied winter’s darkness smolder into mere ashes, but we’re not done with sword and sorcery yet! No indeed, not on this, the most sword-and-sorcerous sounding holiday of the year…Three Kings’ Day! And what better way to celebrate it than by talking about the Last King of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn! It’s Robert E. Howard’s “Worms of the Earth” from Weird Tales, November 1932!

We’ve talked about ol’ REH a lot during the sword and sorcery festivities; how can you not? We’ve encountered both Solomon Kane and Conan in some great stories already, but for me, personally, I think Howard’s single greatest character is Bran Mak Morn – there’s something really compelling about him, this very last ruler of Pictdom, presiding over a declining and dying people and watching the Romans marching over his homeland. Howard loved to indulge in a certain Celtic gloominess, both personally and literarily, and that’s fully on display in the Bran stories. It lends them a poignancy that’s not often present in his other works; Conan’s barbarism and Kane’s zealotry are portrayed as powerful and vital forces, elemental and therefore permanent, but Bran is the last of his kind, and we know that he is destined to be ground down by the millstone of implacable history.

Aside from the purely aesthetic appeal of this Pictish mono no aware, it’s also a chance to see Howard examining a different point in the Spenglerian cyclicity he believed in; Kull and Conan are barbarians who, in Howard’s weird racialist worldview, revitalize their respective nations by taking up the crown and injecting their own wild vitality into civilized kingship. But here we see a people at the end of their “natural” lifespan, senescent and impoverished, struggling vainly against an ascendant Empire. And, to top it all off, in this story Bran glimpses the possible fate of his own Picts when he confronts the twisted and degraded remnants of a people his own ancestors had conquered and displaced! Bran Mak Morn is Howard’s greatest, most interesting character, which makes this story, “Worms of the Earth,” his greatest sword and sorcery story ever, at least for me. Hell, I’d put it up there as one of the all time greatest stories in the genre ever!

Worth keeping in mind is that the readers of Weird Tales had yet to be introduced to Conan at this point; Kane had made it to the pages of The Unique Magazine already, of course, and Kull had shown up in a previous Bran story from 1930 (“Kings of the Earth”), so readers were certainly familiar with Howard’s blood-and-thunder style and approach. The Cimmerian himself wouldn’t show up until the NEXT issue of Weird Tales, when “Phoenix on the Sword” would be published (Dec 1932), and after that, of course, Howard’s career and writing really changes; I think “Worms of the Earth” is still very much a weird tale, with its emphasis on inhuman horrors, atavism, and vast sweeps of time embodied in ancient landscapes. It’s still very much sword and sorcery, of course, but I think that it isn’t until Conan that Howard tips the balance more towards adventure and away from the Lovecraftian-influenced cosmicism on display here. But enough jibber jabber, let’s get to it!

A great swashbuckling cover, but this isn’t Bran fighting a Loch Monster or anything…it’s Kline’s heroic Venusian he-man Grandon fighting some swamp-dwelling space devil! Kline is an interesting guy; along with Farnsworth Wright, he had been an early editorial assistant to the first editor of the magazine, Baird, and had stayed on as an editor and reader under Wright, as well as writing his own weird fiction, fantasy, detective stories, and science fiction. He would shortly leave off writing, focusing more on becoming a literary agent for a number of big names in the pulps, including Howard himself! In fact, after Howard’s death by suicide in ’36, Kline would continue to represent his estate, helping Howard’s father get the many thousands of dollars still owed to REH by Weird Tales (and some other magazines, too). The scene illustrated here on this cover is interesting; first off, it’s from what would end up being a novel-length work that would stretch over seven issues of the magazine. It’s obviously a pastiche on Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” novels, largely successfully so too, I might add; if you liked those novels, then you’ll almost certainly like Kline’s planetary romances, which are often more-Burroughs than Burroughs in execution. But this cover also illustrates that, while Howard is rightfully identified as the creator of sword-and-sorcery, there was both a lineage of swashbuckling weird fiction that predated and inspired him AS WELL AS a clear hunger from readers for that kind of thing.

Nothing too noteworthy in the ToC (other than our story today), but the Weird Story Reprint is interesting; they’d reprinted “Frankenstein,” with this issue’s segment being the penultimate entry in an eight-issue long stretch that really annoyed a lot of people. There had always been some annoyance with multi-part stories among the readers, because of the dangers of missing an issue, but in particular a lot of people felt that reprinting a classic that almost everyone had read or could have easily gotten a copy of was a waste of good magazine space. It would actually lead to a change in policy for Wright and the magazine, which would in response to those complaints rededicate itself to reprinting more obscure work (for more about the history of the “Weird Story Reprint” series in the magazine, you should read my introduction to the collection “Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation” from Paradise Edition books).

And now, on to the story itself!

A great title illustration, as usual, and one that doesn’t even spoil the story or anything! Just a great scene from one of the best parts of the story, in my opinion, with a really subtly devilish Atla and a grim and haunted looking Bran… wonderful stuff! The shadows are a nice touch, too, very moody and pensive and weird. It’s signed “MW,” but based on the style I’m pretty sure it’s J.M. Wilcox’s work (sometimes known as Jayem Wilcox, or JMW). Wilcox would go on to produce the very first illustration of Conan when he did the title art for “The Phoenix on the Sword” next issue, making him an important part of sword and sorcery history.

Pumped up with that great bit of art, we’re ready to dive into the text of the story!

Love a story that starts with dialog; gives it an immediacy that can’t be beat, in my opinion. And this dialog starts off strong – nothing good is going on, you can be sure of that, and that conclusion is further supported by the imperial haughtiness of Titus Sulla, lounging in his chair of office, surrounded by a guard of Teutonic legionaries. You can again see Howard’s preoccupation with bodies and physicality here, too – Sulla is a Roman, but he’s no weak, lisping functionary, made soft by bureaucracy and civilization. No, he’s a soldier, a conqueror with a strong body and cruel countenance, and he’s surrounded by other huger bodies, “blond titans” from Germania, further symbol of the power and decadence of Rome. These powerful bodies are immediately contrasted with another body, this one made abject:

It’s a crucifixion party, one apparently being put on for the sake of the “guest” mentioned above, a dark man identified later “Partha Mac Othna.” But before we get this name, we get a very Ellsworth Huntington-esque discourse of race, civilization, and climate that contrasts this dark somber man with the Romans and Germans that surround him.

A “supple, compact body” with “broad square shoulders,” a “deep chest,” “lean loins…” you can joke all you want, but Howard’s fascination with and interest in masculinity and its physicality is certainly enthusiastic and sincere. Similarly expressed in this story is REH’s belief in the importance of racial purity, as made clear by the comparison of this dark, northern barbarian with his two compatriots, one at his feet and one on the cross:

There’s some kinship between these three, though it’s clear that the man on the cross and the “stunted crouching giant” represent a “lower type” than the clean-limbed and well-knit dark man. This racial hierarchy stuff is a central part of Bran’s pathos, for Howard at least, and it’s something that we’ll come back to in the story later. But for now, let’s get this guy crucified!

There’s some more verbal sparring, almost as if the Sulla is trying to goad his “guest” into something, but the strange, noble-looking Pict seems to reserve his ire for the Pictish King:

Takin’ it kinda personally, isn’t he? Almost weirdly so…oh well.

Anyway, they crucify the guy, who doesn’t scream out in pain or anything, only staring at Partha Mac Othna with a strange and plaintive intensity. Seeking to mock their victim’s suffering, a Roman solider offers the dying man a cup of wine and receives a defiant loogie in the eyes instead. Enraged, the soldier stabs the man with his sword, which pisses of Sulla something fierce.

The Pictish emissary stays awhile, contemplating the dead body hanging on its cross against a reddening sky, before turning back and heading to the Roman fortress city. A grim and perilous beginning to the story indeed!

How about that little bit of Yog-Sothery there, huh? “Black gods of R’yleh” is great, and the fact that “Partha” here would evoke even THEM speaks to his anger and despair at Rome. But why does this feller feel such animus towards to the Romans, you ask? Well…

What a twist! Partha Mac Othna is, in fact, Bran Mak Morn, King of Picts, posing as an emissary to gather intelligence on these his most hated of foes! Grom, his gnarled companion, begs his master to keep his voice down; the Romans would hang him from a cross if they knew who he really was. Rather, why not let faithful ol’ Grom ice the Roman dick?

I mean, that’s some top notch, grade-A badassery right there, isn’t it? Grom’ll happily run a suicide mission for his King, vowing to kill Sulla anyway, even if he is surrounded by bodyguards. But Bran knows that won’t work, and instead is already working on another plan…

It turns out that Sulla is frickin’ terrified of a certain Gael by the name of Cormac na Conacht who has vowed to eat Sulla’s heart raw. Showing sensible caution vis a vis having his heart eaten, Sulla tends to stick to the impenetrable fortress known at the Tower of Trajan when there’s trouble along the Wall. This knowledge inspires Bran to some dark, fearful plan…he sends Grom out of town with some gold and his diplomatic pass; he’s to ride to Cormac and get him to start raiding, sending Sulla off to the Tower. Then Bran takes a quick nap, where in a dream he meets his faithful advisor the Wizard Gonar who, having divined Bran’s yet-to-me-specified plan, is absolutely freaking the hell out:

What “this thought” is exactly will remain obscure, for now, but it does lead to a pretty great speech from Bran explaining why he has been pushed to this extreme measure (whatever it is):

It’s some real “burden of kingship” shit, sure, but damn if it doesn’t get me. In particular, the stuff about their shared experiences I find pretty moving…both of them listened to the same tales and songs, and that forged an unbreakable bond of shared heritage that held them together. And that final statement is, again, just a perfect encapsulation of a sword-and-sorcery ethos: by those bonds, Bran had the responsibility to protect him, and if he cannot do that, then he will avenge him. Shivery, noble stuff, great fantasy writing, some of the best Howard ever did in my opinion. And there’s more to come!

But Gonar is still scared. Why not just chop some dudes up like usual, he asks, ride along with the Gaels and slaughter Romans from sun-up to sun-down. Oh, don’t worry, Bran replies, I’ll definitely be doing that…BUT FIRST he wants something special for Sulla.

We’re spending A LOT of time on this early part of the story, I know, but I think it’s worth it to see Howard really doing some great work establishing Bran Mak Morn and the world of the Picts and Romans here. Bran has been fighting these Romans for a long time, and we feel his desperation and struggle – you get the sense that it’s not been going great for the Picts. After all, why else would their goddamn King risk himself to sneak into their stronghold? Things must’ve gotten pretty dire back in Pictland. And then, to have seen his man crucified and forced to confront his failures as King and Protector…he’s gone a little crazy now, and nothing is off limits in his war against the Romans.

Gonar tries one last desperate gamble: the things Bran is planning on using have gone from the world, they’ve dwelled apart for countless ages and no one knows where they are now. But Bran is sure that that can’t be true…somewhere, there is some sign, some thread of a connection that will lead him to them.

Really appreciate the care Howard is taking here – right now, we have no fuckin’ clue as to what exactly it is that Bran is planning, but it’s been made clear that it is dire as hell and going to be extremely dangerous. From a story telling perspective, I just don’t think REH ever hits this level of mastery again, it’s so good and sharp and propulsive. Bran is desperate, his back to the wall, and capable of anything in his quest for vengeance; to him, there’s nothing foul enough for the Romans, no act so base or vile that he wouldn’t stoop to, just so long as Sulla gets his. And even though he’s talked this good game about his responsibilities as king and all that, you see that there’s more there – it’s a deep, personal affront that he wants to avenge, so much so that Gonar basically calls him out for putting this personal hatred ahead of the actual needs of the Picts. It’s great stuff, isn’t it?

Before Bran heads out on his insane and horrific mission, he takes a brief moment to sneak over to the prison to murder the roman soldier that stabbed the Pict on the cross. It’s yet another scene of great badass action, particularly in the way Howard described Bran’s dark chuckle, the slash through the barred windows, and the blood welling up from Valerius’s throat as he dies. Ticking that chore off his to-do list, Bran then rides out of the city and into the wilderness, searching for…them.

There’s some great, evocative environmental writing in this section, wildernesses and border regions and ancient landscapes all lovingly described by ol’ REH. The romanticism of landscapes, and their hidden dangers, are something Howard is really well-equipped to work with in his fiction, having reflected extensively on his own wildernesses and frontiers back in Cross Plains, Texas. I’m also a sucker for ancient, nameless earthworks – these curiously regular hillocks and mysterious monoliths are wonderfully potent images, suggestive of deep time and lost civilizations.

There is also in this section another long paean to racial purity from Howard. As we’ve already mentioned, Howard was an unapologetic and enthusiastic racist, something that strongly informed his fictional stories, as we see here:

A big part of Howard’s disdain for “civilization” comes from his belief in racial purity – with civilization comes miscegenation, which for Howard is both unnatural and decadent. What’s funny, though, is how all this talk of Bran being a pure-blooded noble from a long-line of reproductively isolated aristocrats strikes us today; far from the strong limbed and lean-loined pantherish ubermensch Howard described, talking about Bran’s paternity like that immediately evokes the Hapsburgs, at least for me. The idea of Bran looking like Charles II of Spain during all this stuff going on is hilarious, and makes his revulsion at the fenmen, Atla, and the Worms of the Earth themselves later in the story all the funnier.

But anyway, Bran is spending some time wandering around the wastelands, searching for any sign of the horrible things that once dwelt there. He gets news from the fen dwellers, and learns that his Gaelic buddy Cormac has begun raiding, spreading terror all along the Wall and sending Sulla scurrying off to the Tower of Trajan, just like Bran said he would. Meanwhile Bran, all alone, keeps up his hunt, until one day he spies a distant daub-and-wattle hut in a particularly lonely corner of the fens. He goes to investigate, and meets one of the greatest characters in sword-and-sorcery history.

This is Atla, and she’s 100% rad as hell. Howard lets us know immediately that she’s not entirely human, too – she’s got fang-like teeth, almost pointed ears, oddly-shaped yellow eyes, and all her movements are sinuous, lithe, and serpentine. Bran recognizes all the signs, and since he’s one of the Old Picts, he knows the stories, guesses her heritage, and knows she can help him.

There’s so much to love about this – the fencing between Atla and Bran, and the shock and horror that even she feels to hear Bran speak so openly and blithely about forbidden things, it’s really fantastic. But even more, there’s a real grimness and sorrow to Atla, something strange and sad and special that you makes her character so interesting and unique. For one thing, she’s utterly and completely ostracized, living way the hell out in a place called the Dagon-Moor which you KNOW is not exactly on any of the major bus routes. She’s been exiled out here because of her heritage; it’s implied that she’s the product of a rape, a human mother attacked by one of them out on the moors, and that her inhuman blood has meant that she’s been driven to the very edge of the human world. And that revulsion is definitely something Bran feels too, even though she is the only thing that can help him find the Worms of the Earth.

Atla’s recklessness and scorn is just fantastic here, and the way she laughs at Bran’s threat is wonderful. Her mocking question “Do you think that such life as mine is so sweet that I would cling to it” is really great, an absolute gut-punch. And Bran’s realization that he’ll have to try different means of persuasion is met with equal scorn!

Atla is such a badass! But, after all that, Atla does have a price.

I think this is some of the best writing Howard ever did. There’s a real and aching loneliness to Atla, and it’s tempting to think that Howard, an artistic and romantic young man living way the hell out in an oil boomtown in central Texas, might’ve been mining something of himself when he’s having Atla express this deep and heartfelt yearning. There’s real humanity in Atla, probably the most you’ll ever see in a Howard character honestly – the only other example that I feel like even comes close to this is Balthus’ reminiscing about home from the Conan story “Beyond the Black River.”

Anyway, Bran swallows his revulsion and agrees to have sex with the snake lady, and Howard tastefully draws the curtains on the scene.

The next morning, while Bran is dressing for his walk of shame, Atla tells him that what he needs to do is steal the Black Stone; with that, he can force them to do whatever he wants. The Stone is deep beneath Dagon’s Barrow, which, again, love that Lovecraft connection.

There’s some fun stuff here for sure, and I can’t help but wonder if Tolkien (who certainly had read some Howard) read this one in particular – between the faces in the mere that Atla mentions, and then this whole shunning of sunlight and moonlight and even starlight, there’s some real Gollum resonances here, you know? But, regardless, this is prime sword-and-sorcery stuff, especially that last sentence; the idea that the Picts and these subterranean horrors have history really nicely sharpens the threat and danger of Bran’s scheme.

Bran, armed with the knowledge that Atla has given him, heads out, finds the strange prehuman stone circle atop Dagon’s Barrow, lifts the stone, and plunges into the deep darkness of the Earth. The path he’s on mirror the devolution of the Worms themselves, going from rough hewn steps to a smooth and almost slimy tunnel at the base. There, in a dark chamber, he finds the Black Stone, and is able to abscond with it. He decides to stash it in Dagon’s Mere, chunking the rock out into the center of the eerie pond.

Bran returns to Atla, who is not unsurprised to see him both alive and sane after his trip into the darkness beneath the Earth. Bran informs her that not only has he safely secreted away the Black Stone, but that he has become aware of things hunting him…his horse trod on something unnatural in its stable one night, and he’s been hearing a faint scrabbling beneath the earthen floor of his hut. They’re hunting him, using whatever strange senses and powers they’ve developed over their long exile in the dark. Now he’s ready to deal, and so Atla takes him to a forlorn range of hills that border the fen where the black mouth of a cave yawns wide to take them in.

Howard really paints the landscape here, conveying both its distance from humanity in both space and time – this is an old place, and the things that live here are older than the Romans, the Celts, and even the Picts. That sense of Deep Time, a key part of weird fiction, is really well-expressed here, a testament to Howard’s own appreciation of the earth and the tiny, transient things that call its surface home.

Bran and Atla plunge into the cave, and its somewhat shocking to both us and Bran that Atla herself is scared here – in lesser hands, the snake woman would be a one-off monster lady, but Howard makes sure we understand that she meant it when she said she was “half human, at least.” This place and the things that live there are scary as hell and fully alien, even to her.

And then they meet the Worms of the Earth.

Spectacular writing from Howard here, this sea of glowing eyes in the dark. It’s really truly an eerie and uncanny scene, but does it spook Bran?

Fuckin’ bad ass, man! And these horrible subterranean things think so too – Bran rolls a nat 20 on his intimidation check, and the Worms of the Earth are fully cowed by his killer speech. They hiss and mutter with Atla, and she’s shocked to report that they’re actually scared of Bran, and will do whatever he wants in exchange for the stolen the Black Stone. Bran wants them to take Sulla from the Tower of Trajan, and he agrees to meet them at Dagon’s Ring tomorrow and exchange the stone for the Roman.

Bran goes for a swim in Dagon’s Mere, recovering the Stone that he chucked in there earlier, which is heroic enough in my opinion – I once dropped something in Barton Creek Pool here in Austin, which is a natural spring fed pool with crystal clear water, and I never found it again…and there’s not even monsters in Barton Creek Pool! That’s actually a really fun little piece of this story too – there IS a monster in Dagon’s Mere, something huge and threatening which Bran only catches a glimpse and a ripple of. It reminds me a lot of the scene in Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” where we learn that there’s some kind of huge white polypus thing in the swamps of Louisiana that the cultists commune with…you can’t beat these little hints of other weird shit and scary monsters on the periphery of a main story, in my opinion. It’s an evocative and effective tool in weird fiction’s box, and I appreciate it here because, in addition to just being fun, it’s also part of Bran’s mounting realization that he actually doesn’t know this landscape or its history as well as he thought he did.

Black Stone in hand, Bran rides towards Dagon’s Ring, making a brief stop over to see what’s happening at Trajan’s Tower, just out of idle curiosity.

He finds a dying Legionary amid the ruins, and from him he hears a tale of horror.

Bran realizing that he might’ve fucked up here is pretty great – he forced these things to involve themselves in the surface world again, and maybe he doesn’t have as much control as he thought he did over this situation. It’s a grim moment for Bran, who had been expecting to get this great triumphant revenge on his hated enemy…and it’s only going to get worse…

Bran, horrified at the destruction he’s wrought, hurries on to Dagon’s Ring, where he meets Atla and sees a seething, shadowy tide of the things approaching through the grass. And mingled in with the susurrus of their hissing is a lone human voice, gibbering and tittering. Bran demands that they give him Sulla, and Atla, with a smirk, presents him.

Sulla has been driven mad, not by anything they did to him, but by the simple brain-shattering realization of the true nature of a world honeycombed by tunnels through which inhuman horrors swarm and thrive. Bran kills Sulla, not in rage but rather out of mercy, realizing that there are in fact some weapons too foul and terrible to use. He hurls the Black Stone into the seething mass of shadows, and for a moment gets a clear view of them:

If Lovecraft’s synecdoche of horror is the deep sea, with its tentacles and slime, then Howard’s is the reptile, particularly the snake, with all its symbolism of ancient and pre-mammalian life and potency. The Worms of the Earth, the things that were once almost men before being driven underground and sinking deeper in atavism, are basically hellish snake-things, subtly human perhaps, but mostly all cold scales and merciless coils and hissing, flickering tongues. Sick with terror, Bran flees, but not before Atla gets a final mocking shot off.

And that’s the end of Robert E. Howard’s masterpiece, “The Worms of the Earth.”

It’s just so good, isn’t it? I mean, the characters are great, the setting is a blast, the action is killer, and the ending is perfect and horrible, with Bran having unleashed something that should’ve been left well enough alone. I love basically everything about this story; the pacing is even good, which can be tough in a short story that’s trying to deal with such a wide scope of geography and action.

Unfortunately, Howard never did take up the semi-cliffhanger he left there at the end, though. For all intents and purposes, this is the last Bran Mak Morn story he ever wrote – he’s mentioned again in a later, modern horror tale (“The Children of the Night”), but REH never again gives us a story about the Last King of the Picts. Karl Edward Wagner, most famous for his grim n’ gritty Kane stories DID write a sequel novel based on the premise that Bran had awakened a horror in the hills; it’s called “Legion of Shadows” from the 70s, and I remember liking it well enough as a pastiche, although I don’t think it nails the real weirdness or tragedy of REH’s original story.

I’ve gone on and on about what I like in this story, so I won’t repeat myself, but I really do think this is one of the greatest sword and sorcery stories ever written. There’s a real depth to this one, with a lot of actually meditative moments from Bran, something that’s sometimes lost in the wilder and more action-packed Conan stories to come. And while the Cimmerian would end up defining the genre, I think Bran Mak Morn and his tragic, dying Picts illustrate some of its strengths better than Conan ever does, exploring history, memory, violence, obsession, and regret while also delivering a rollicking, tense adventure story full of flashing swords and horrible snakemen. I mean, what more could you want!?

Pulp and the Gray Strainer #18: “Two Sought Adventure” by Fritz Leiber, Jr., Unknown, Aug 1939, v.1 n.6

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Many names of Great Renown grace the Annals of the Heroic Age of the Pulps, but even in that ancient age of mighty deeds, three names tower above all others with regard to sword and sorcery. Howard we have touched upon twice (and we’ll revisit him soon enough), and we devoted a whole month to the incomparable C.L. Moore, so I reckon it’s high time we hit the final member of the classical sword and sorcery trinity! That’s right, we’re finally going to encounter Fritz Leiber’s foundational duo, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in their very first published story, “Two Sought Adventure,” from the August 1939 issue of Unknown!

Of course, we’ve already talked about ol’ Fritz, but that was in regards to his weird fiction story “The Automatic Pistol” from 1940 in Weird Tales, which is good and a lot of fun, you should read it. But undoubtedly Fritz’s greatest creations and most lasting renown come from the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Given that, AND the fact that he’s the one who actually coined “Sword and Sorcery” for this the best of all genres, I think it’s appropriate to give him another fanfare and more detailed biographical info this time around.

Leiber is, for my money, one of the best writers of genre fiction from the 40s through the 60s, in many ways a predecessor to the New Wave that would revolutionize science fiction in the 70s. His background and various experiences give his writing a depth and vitality that’s really unparalleled, especially for the time; he was the son of Shakespearean actors (and he himself acted on the stage), he was a fencer and an expert chess player, studied for (but did not get) a graduate degree in Philosophy, studied for but did not become a minister at a seminary, read and wrote for technical encyclopedias as a day job, taught as a drama instructor at Occidental college…I mean, the list pretty well sums up Leiber’s interests and the themes he explored in his writing. He also had a brief but important correspondence with Lovecraft near the end of the Old Gent’s life, and in many of his memoirs/recollections he attributed much of his development as a writer to HPL’s encouragement and advice. He wrote a lot of great stuff; his 1947 collection, “Night’s Black Agents” is simply one of the best short story collections of the era, in addition to having just the coolest fucking title of all time (a line from Macbeth, Leiber again subtly showing off his erudition).

Unfortunately, like a lot of writers in the post-pulp era, Leiber had a hard time of it financially. He lived in some apparently truly squalid apartments in California, and there’s some great anecdotes from the 70s of Harlan Ellison raging about how Leiber was forced to do his writing on a shitty typewriter propped up over the kitchen sink. Actually, it wasn’t until TSR, the company that made Dungeons & Dragons, licensed the rights to Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser that he was able to live somewhat more securely and comfortably. Frankly, and as we’ll see in today’s story, even if they hadn’t made official Leiber products, TSR 100% should have just been sending checks to Leiber (and Wellman and Vance) because a shockingly large amount of fantasy tabletop roleplaying is taken directly from his work.

Leiber wrote in a lot of different genres, although you might be surprised at how few times his work showed up in Weird Tales, despite his association with Lovecraft and horror. Case in point, today’s story was published in Unknown, the short-lived fantasy-focused companion to Astounding Science Fiction created and edited by lil’ Johnny W. Campbell himself. Campbell, as we’ve mentioned before, considered himself an intellectual and so he envisioned a a similarly intellectual fantasy magazine that would compete with Weird Tales. Unknown was therefore less lurid, more realistic (or at least the magic and monsters where supposed to be more internally rational), and generally more literary and sophisticated, even going so far as to allow for humor! That said, apparently Campbell would often tell Leiber that his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories were more like “Weird Tales stories, but…” he would accept them anyway. In fact, no Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story would ever appear in the pages of Weird Tales, which is kind of interesting.

That’s right, the cover of this issue went to Thelemite and future Founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. It’s a fairly bland cover, in my opinion, kind of lacking the *punch* you’d see in, say, a Brundage cover from Weird Tales. Very much more main stream looking, in my opinion.

The ToC shows Campbell’s editorial perspective too – fewer stories, but longer. That Hubbard is 90 pages (stretching somewhat the definition of “novel” perhaps, but still…that’s a long ‘un for a magazine)! You’ve got some of Campbell’s heavy hitters here too, del Rey and Kuttner, both important in the pulps and (del Rey as an editor in particular) in the paper back revolution that would come post WWII. Also neat are the two “Readers’ Departments,” integral parts of the participatory fandom that played a huge role in the development of modern genre literature. Unknown had a fun readers’ letters section; taking the title from the famous lines of Omar Khayyam is a very evocative, stylish, and literary thing to do, and the illo is good too:

Very E.C. Comics, isn’t it? But, godammit, let’s get to the story! Fritz Leiber’s first ever published short story AND also the very first adventure of that incomparable duo, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser!

And more comic-book style art, though this time maybe it’s more “Prince Valiant” than “Vault of Horror.” Honestly not really my cup-o-tea, if’n ye ask me…just a fairly bland fantasy scene, though at least Unknown has enough sense NOT to toss in an illustration from the climax of the story right off the bat. Still, I wish the artists had had a little more verve or style or something, especially for such great and visually distinct characters (and situations) that appear here. Oh Well!

First thing first, I love fantasy calendrics like that…”Year of the Behemoth, Month of the Hedgehog, the Day of the Toad…” it’s just really fun, an easy and striking bit of genre semiotics that immediately shifts the reader into a “fantasy adventure” mode. Leiber keeps ladling on that fantastical flavor with more and more little flourishes, scenes of bucolic yeoman farmers, medieval-esque mercantilism, followed by the promise of a shift-change to astrologers and thieves; it’s great writing that sets a specific scene AS WELL AS positioning the whole of the story within a certain genre-space. And then it’s followed by a couple of paragraphs that introduce the main characters.

The tall northern barbarian is, of course, Fafhrd, while the small dark man is The Gray Mouser. As far as introductions go, these can’t be beat. Their gear, their appearance, their movements, everything is in service of explaining and presenting their characteristics – Fafhrd is a bluff and forthright barbarian in rough linen, bearing a sword and bow, and with a hint of wildness to him, while The Mouser is sneaky, clever, sharp, and secretive. It’s frankly just a perfect intro, efficient and effective.

Of course, we haven’t actually learned their names yet, although that’s not too far off in this story. Still, they’re very well developed and, for the most part, fully formed, the same characters that we’ll meet in their future adventures – this is due to the fact that Leiber, with his friend Harry Fischer (who actually created and named Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, basing them off of Leiber and himself) had been exploring the two and their world for several years already. Leiber in fact had already written several of their adventures already, and that background had practice has given Leiber a good handle on these two.

Anyway, as these two are riding along they’re suddenly ambushed! Bows twang, arrows fly, and the pair spur their horses onward, pursued by a band of eight or so well-armed and similarly equipped ruffians. But, unfortunately for the thugs, these two guys are characters in a sword and sorcery story who have JUST been introduced, so they use this convenient ambush to demonstrate their unparalleled skill and toughness.

Fafhrd executes a flawless Parthian shot and the Mouser zings a leaden ball back at their pursuers, striking two riders down and sending the rest scattering. That done, it’s time we got PROPERLY introduced to these two bad-asses:

There’s a cool efficiency to these two that Leiber likes to play with, particularly in their dialog and the way they speak to each other about what’s going on, always commenting on the action and characters around them. Their friendship is really compelling and very lived in and is, honestly, probably pretty familiar to a lot of people; these two are the kind of friends who, confronted with dangers or troubles, tend to minimize all the challenges they face, kidding around and making fun of the “blundering fools” who would dare challenge them, always talking each other up. It’s a great bit, honestly, and helps reinforce the central idea of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: they are self-mythologizers that are always confident that they are the main characters in a story. Sometimes this self-awareness comes awfully close to metafictive fourth-wall breaking, but where Hamlet struggles against the role he’s cast in, the Mouser and Fafhrd relish it – they are swashbuckling sword-and-sorcery heroes, the very best possible thing to be, and they’re having a great time (even when they’re not, really).

Having dealt with the ambush, the two realize that this very valley is most likely the one they’ve been searching for. The Mouser unrolls an ancient vellum, and we’re introduced to their quest:

Certainly a taunting tone to Urgaan of Angarngi’s missive, isn’t there? He’s daring treasure-hungry fools to come and face the challenge of his mysterious treasure tower, but that doesn’t daunt these two. Rather, as they ride on, The Mouser reflects on how similarly equipped and armed the ambushers they faced were, suggesting that they might have been Lord Rannarsh’s men. It turns out that the Mouser cut the vellum sheet about the treasure tower out of an ancient book in Rannarsh’s library, and that the Lord, famously avaricious, might’ve taken notice of the theft and sent his boys out to kill them and claim the treasure for himself. Fafhrd scoffs at the idea, which of course means that The Mouser will turn out to be 100% correct.

The two adventurers come across a small cottage not far from the stumpy ruins of the tower, meeting a hilariously taciturn old farmer and his large extended family.

I like the farmer, and the later scenes with his whole family are really great, but for now Fafhrd and The Mouser decide to reconnoiter the tower in the fading light. It takes them a strangely long time to reach the tower, which seemed so close, and when they get there they find a skull and shattered bones just inside the treasure house. A strange sensation of foreboding and danger settles over The Mouser.

Very good foreshadowing, I think; the sense that there is very much something unnatural going on in this treasure tower, something watching and waiting and certainly at least a little sorcerous is conveyed well, but we’re still wondering what exactly is going on.

Heading back to the cabin, the two have a great and boisterous evening with the farmer and his family. Mouser does magic tricks, Fafhrd roars his wild sagas, and they get the whole lot of ’em drunk on wine. It’s probably my favorite scene in the whole story, actually, a wonderful little slice of life scene that really evokes the strangeness of these two adventurers showing up out of nowhere and throwing the normal humdrum pattern of these people’s lives pleasantly off kilter. Leiber is of course just as interested in adventures and swordplay and derring-do as Howard, but he’s ALSO interested in the little material things of life that define the world; his stories are steeped in this kind of rich, lived-in detail, with an interest in the way people spend their downtime. In addition to just being flat-out a lot of fun to read, I think it’s also an important development in sword-and-sorcery literature, a real key moment. Here, back in ’39, Leiber is illustrating to people a kind of “fantasy realism” that uses realistic, naturalistic details to deepen and enrich a secondary world setting.

Of course, it also serves a nice narrative function, because the ancient old man, roused by wine and sing, manages to croak out an enigmatical little statement:

“Maybe beast won’t get you” and then he konks out…great stuff! And it’s echoed again the next day when, striking out early in the morning, they’re stopped by the gangly and shy farmer’s daughter, who has a warning for them.

This family of farmers live right next door to a death trap, apparently, and have learned to give the place a wide berth and keep a respectful distance. I really like how Leiber uses the peasants here – again, they have had to live next to this tower. Whatever danger dwells within, they’ve learned how to avoid it, getting on with their own life in the shadow of its threat. It’s only interlopers and outsiders who blunder into the tower who get killed. It’s a fun, subtle inversion of what a fantasy hero armed with cunning and expertise and knowledge and all that.

But of course no warning, no matter how blood-curdling or threatening, would cause Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser to turn aside from a quest. They continue on through the woods, reflecting merrily (and perhaps a bit unconvincingly) on the remarkable imagination of the farmer’s daughter. Then they meet a very material threat: the men who had ambushed them yesterday have regrouped and reformed at the tower. It’s obvious that they know about the treasures rumored to kept in there, since they’ve also brought shovels and picks.

There’s a long (and good!) scene of sneaking and combat, with Fafhrd and The Mouser getting the drop on these guys. Now, I find the “Fantasy Combat Discourse” generally pretty boring, but I DO like the way Leiber does his fights. To be fair, if you’re one of those HEMA nerds who pours over fechtbücher and owns a broadsword, you’re going to be annoyed with Leiber; he’s a fencer, apparently a very good one, and so the way his heroes fight is very much informed by that. In particular, Fafhrd tends to wield his enormous sword a lot like a rapier, something that might strike some as silly. Deal with it, though, is all I can say, because the combat in this section is fun, and also better than any swordplay that Howard wrote – Conan might hew his way through twenty dudes, but Fafhrd is having to be realistically careful fighting two guys who have him flanked. There’s a sharper sense of danger, is what I’m getting at, probably because Leiber at least has a sense from actual fencing practice about the ways someone can get overextended or leave themselves vulnerable. Makes his fighting descriptions that much scrappier, I think.

A certain red-haired fellow among the ambushers confirms what The Mouser had suspected: these were Rannarsh’s men, and the venal lord had certainly hoped to get the fabled gems himself. Following the battle, there’s a great bit of Fafhrd barbarism – the combat over, becomes first almost hysterically hilarious, and then deeply, almost ridiculously, solemn about a man he’d just killed.

This is contrasted with The Mouser’s own reaction – he may be feeling a little sick and anxious now, but he knows that the force of the combat won’t come on him for some time. It’s another of these Leiber flourishes, a deep and abiding interest in the interiority of his characters and the often very different ways people can react to or experience extreme things. It is simultaneously taking a part in and commenting on the Howardian tropes of sword-and-sorcery, in particular the way Fafhrd’s barbarism is being contrasted with The Mouser’s more urbane reaction.

Entering the tower, The Mouser is relieved that he no longer feels the dread that had oppressed him the night before. They explore the first chamber of the tower, and run across more smashed skeletons – it seems like something indeed has been pulverizing interlopers here, although it may have been a very long time ago. Interestingly, however, the two find a scroll case on one of the corpses that includes a note very similar to their own!

This note, along with the many other skeletons strewn about Urgaan’s treasure house, reveal the truth: the dude has made some kind of death trap, and is luring people here with tales of unbelievable treasures.

Undeterred, the two advance up the stairs, determined to search out discover the treasure. As they reach the top of the stairs, steel glitters in the dark as a knife is hurled from a doorway, nicking the Mouser in the shoulder! Enraged, he darts into the room, sword drawn, and discovers Lord Rannarsh hiding there.

Unmanned by fear, Rannarsh seems only to be interested in escaping, even abandoning all claims to the treasure. However, confronted by his hated enemies, he masters himself enough to try a second dagger, which earns him a skewering at the hands of The Gray Mouser. Following his death, Fafhrd muses on how Rannarsh seemed to be seeking death, which The Mouser says was simply because he had appeared weak and afraid in front of witnesses. It’s another trademark of this duo, always willing to believe that others are as awed of them as they are of themselves, conveniently ignoring all other contradicting information, like when Rannash refered to a “thing” that had been playing “cat and mouse” with him. But, just as The Mouser makes this pronouncement, a sudden and horrific pall of fear falls upon them!

Having failed their saving throw vs fear, the two of them are frozen to the spot, listening to the steady footfall of someone approaching through the tower, up the stairs, and coming towards them. Eventually, a new NPC is introduced, an ancient looking holy man who looks grimly over the room before greeting them.

This man is Arvlan, a direct descendant of Urgaan, here to destroy the horror that his ancestor has left behind. Not letting them speak, Arvlan explains his purpose and history, and then sweeps out of the room on his holy mission.

Arvlan, we hardly knew ye! But, interestingly, once Arvlan gets mashed offscreen, the paralyzing fear that had held the two of them in thrall lifts, and they’re able to move again. Swords out, they rush into the room and see the red ruin left behind of the holy man, crushed and splattered in the middle of the room. But their attention is soon drawn away from the corpse and towards a stone marked with the words “Here rests the treasure of Urgaan of Angarngi.”

The two of them set to work, using pick, mattock, and pry-bar to begin their excavations. Weirdly, they quickly encounter some kind of strange, tarry substance in among the masonry, though not even that gives them pause; they keep gauging away, eventually exposing enough of raw stone that they can get their pry-bar in and wiggle it around, loosening and gouging alternatively. As they keep at the work, though, a new strange feeling of revulsion comes over The Mouser, a sensation clearly related to this dark, foul smelling glop that they’re working on. Nauseated, he goes to a window for a breath of fresh air, and sees down below them the farmer’s daughter. The young girl is clearly trying to screw her courage to the sticking place to come in and warn them of their danger.

A kind of mania descends on everyone now – The Mouser has seen something in the ceiling, but he can’t articulate it even to himself, and instead lurches sick and fearful out of the room, focused only on keeping the girl from entering the tower. Meanwhile, Fafhrd seems possessed, blind and deaf to everything else expect the stone that hides the treasure. Like the weird fear aura the place had earlier, it seems like the tower is projecting some kind of weird psychic effect, and everyone is mostly powerless to resist it. As the Mouser reaches the bottom of the stairs, his muddled mind steadies itself enough to realize that what he’d seen on the ceiling was a corresponding smear of gore, the counterpart to the blood on the floor. What could it mean!? And why is the tower suddenly vibrating!?

Meanwhile, Fafhrd has finally cracked into the treasure chest!

In the moment, this is all extremely strange and weird and not entirely clear. A weird basin full of dark celestial mercury, upon which floats a weird tangle of glittering geometric shapes, including the huge diamond promised in Urgaan’s message. Everything sparkles with a strange inner light, and Fafhrd weirdly seems to sense that he’s gripping a piece of a thinking mind in his hand as he grabs for the diamond. Meanwhile, the tower is beginning to twist and undulate; The Mouser thinks at first it is toppling, but he realizes there’re no fissures or breaks…rather, it’s like it’s wiggling or bending! Back in the treasure chamber, the weird gems start jittering in the black mercury, and Fafhrd is having a hard time holding on to the skull-sized diamond in his hand. Doors and windows begin to clamp shut, closing like a sphincter, and Fafhrd realizes that the room itself is changing shape.

The Mouser reaches the girl, and they dive for safety beyond the clearing outside of the tower, while Fafhrd confronts the realization that, basically, he’s inside an insane robot.

The diamond, strangely mobile and very hostile, flings itself at Fafhrd’s own skull as he tries to escape, eventually exploding into a cloud of sparkling dust. At that, the tower begins its death throes, with Fafhrd only just escaping before the door slams hut.

There’s a break in the story, resuming after some time has passed.

And that’s the end of the story!

It’s a pretty strange one, isn’t it? I think it’s true to Leiber’s own proclivities, but you can see the Campbellian “rationality” in the tower/robot. Urgaan’s tower is not merely magical; it’s some kind of weird magical technology, complete with what is obviously a kind of high-tech gem-based brain. Presumably, Urgaan has built this conscious robotower as some kind of horrible death trap – lured in, the computer then smooshes all interlopers, it’s weird stone body lubricated by that odd tarry goop. It’s a fun and fully bonkers idea, although it’s not too wildly different from Howard’s magic, which is often more occulto-scientific that pure magic. Why Urgaan would do that is left mysterious, which is actually kind of fun – people can be real assholes, and if you’re some kind of ancient technomancer then maybe that’s the sort of the thing you’d do!

You can also really see the influence Leiber had on Dungeons and Dragons in this story, too. It’s almost exactly the kind of thing Gary Gygax would write, right down to the dungeon built around a weirdly complex and almost certainly fatal death trap. But even beyond the setting and the trappings of the dungeon, I think you get a sense that Gygax et al. ALSO certainly styled their adventurers after Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

And it’s the characters of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser that are so important and foundational to the genre, in my opinion. Even Conan at his most avaricious (say, in “The Jewels of Ghwalur”) ends up shifting gears, exploring a mystery, saving a girl, and engaging in heroics, whereas Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser are almost single-mindedly focused on this tower, ignoring countless warnings and obvious signs that something is amiss. That stubbornness and single-minded selfishness is key to their motivation and characters, and Leiber is really the first writer of the genre to really explore that aspect of sword-and-sorcery. Even though they envision themselves as heroes, any actual heroism that they end up doing is often in spite of themselves. It’s often funny, although only rarely does Leiber play that purely for laughs; rather, their self-importance and unassailable confidence gives them the boost they need to persevere in the face of insane odds. Mostly, Leiber is interested in the way these characters, who clearly see themselves in a certain light, are actually a little more complicated and gray than we might expect. Particularly in the post-Howard world, most of the sword and sorcery heroes are painfully noble barbarians; guys like Elak of Atlantis are even Kings who (despite renouncing a throne) always carry with them a sense of portentousness and destiny. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are different, wanderers and adventurers and thieves, just a couple of scrappy normal dudes who are going to carve their destiny and wealth out of the carcass of the world. Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser are an interesting counterpart to Conan and Jirel, and represent a key part of the evolution of the genre.

Sword & Sorcery & Straining #17! “The Tower of the Elephant” by Robert E. Howard, Weird Tales, March 1933, v. 13, n. 6

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Like a true Barbarian Hero I am currently adventuring in distant lands, having braved the cursed tomb of Newark Airport to arrive in the bleak, windswept hills of Pennsylvania, where death and danger lurk in the shadows of every tree, mountain, and Wawa. But that doesn’t mean an end to my long-as-hell ramblings, no, far from it indeed! For hark! Another edition of Pulp Strainer (Sword & Sorcery Edition) is upon us, and we’re continuing our REH lovefest with probably my favorite Conan story of all time: The Tower of the Elephant from the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales!

“The Tower of the Elephant” is an interesting story because, aside from being rad as hell, it was also the first Conan story where he’s an adventurer, wandering through civilized lands in search of fortune and excitement. The previous two stories published in Weird Tales, “The Phoenix and the Sword” (Dec ’32) and and “The Scarlet Citadel” (Jan ’33) both take place when Conan is wearing the crown of Aquilonia upon his troubled brow (my least favorite phase of Conan’s chronology, personally). Interestingly, the first tranche of three stories that REH submitted to Weird Tales included “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” which had Conan as a young wanderer up among the viking-flavored berserkers of Hyboria; it was rejected by Farnsworth Wright, however, and wouldn’t be published until the 70s, if I recall correctly. “The Phoenix and the Sword” story is a reworking of an unsubmitted Kull story anyway, swapping out Kull for Conan and expanding the evil sorcerer Thoth-Amon a bit, but still it’s mostly concerned with Conan’s tenuous hold on the throne as a barbarian usurper. “Scarlet Citadel” is a similar (but better) story, this time with King Conan betrayed and imprisoned (in a legitimately cool-as-hell dungeon full of awesome monsters) while his kingdom totters.

Both are fun and all, and they certainly have good sword-and-sorcery action, but for my money Conan is at his most interesting when he’s just a rogue and a reaver, a barbarian wandering among “civilized” people, relying on his wits and his strength to survive. According to some histories I’ve read, following the positive response to the first two Conan stories, Wright encouraged Howard to work up an essay on the world of “Hyboria” that he’d created and glancingly mentioned; the result of that work would be important for Howard, who got interested in exploring more of these lands in greater detail, leading him to write “The Tower of the Elephant,” a very different sort of Conan story from those he’d written previously.

But, as always, before we can get into that let’s take a look at the cover! And damn if it ain’t a spicy one this time!

That’s a Brundage, of course, still obscuring her gender behind the semi-pseudonym of “M. Brundage.” Just a straight-up buck-ass naked lady hanging out her wolf pack, what’s it to ya buddy, huh? You some kinda prude or something!? The story is a perfectly serviceable Jules de Grandin adventure from ol’ Quinn, this time with some interesting werewolfery thrown in. As for the ToC, there’s some interesting stuff here too:

Kline, Smith and Ernst here too, all solid fellows, but the interesting thing here (besides from our Conan story) is the “In Memoriam” for Henry Whitehead. Whitehead is an interesting guy, an Episcopalian minister who lived and worked for most of his life in the Virgin Islands (specially St. Croix) and used that setting and island folklore for his weird fiction. He was a good friend of Lovecraft, who actually visited Whitehead in Florida after he’d retired and spent several weeks with him and his family; it’s actually HPL who wrote the “In Memoriam” here, and the affection he felt for his friend is evident, I think. Whitehead is also interesting from a horror perspective because he’s basically the guy who introduced a lot of what would become the dominant pop cultural understanding of “Voodoo” into weird literature. An interesting and important figure, though little known these days.

But enough of that, there’re Towers to be scaled, Threats to be overcome, and Fabled Gems to be plundered! Let’s get into it!

A neat title illustration to this one, by ol’ Jayem Wilcox again. As is usual in Weird Tales, this illustration is based on a scene near the climax of story; it’s a bad habit of theirs and has in the past given away too much of the story, but here it’s okay since the way the story unfolds is a bit more complex than what is shown here. But, regardless, it’s fun to see the way the artists were envisioning Conan at a time when the visual iconography hadn’t been invented yet for sword and sorcery; we’re so used to Frank Frazetta’s iconic paintings from the 70s that these early Conans can be a bit jarring. They always remind me of Douglas Fairbanks, more like a dashingly handsome swashbuckler than the dark and brooding barbarian we’re used to. In particular, the vaguely Celto-roman tunic thing is an interesting touch, especially since Conan is explicitly described as being stripped to the loin cloth for much of this story.

Like I mentioned up top, REH wrote this story hot on the heels of a personal history/geography of his secondary world, something that really comes through in the beginning of this story, I think:

I mean, c’mon; that’s just some incredible sword-n-sorc stuff, right? A thieves’ quarter called The Maul where all the rough bastards and real assholes like to party, a real grim and grimy scene; the sensory language is so rich here, and the combination of visual (torches flaring, steel glinting), auditory (roaring thieves, shrill laughter, scufflings and strugglings, fists-hammering), tactile (sloppy puddles), and especially olfactory (heaped refuse, stale wine and “rank sweaty bodies”) descriptors perfectly evoke a rough neighborhood on a Saturday night in a fantasy city. And all in a single introductory paragraph! There’s a danger of reading REH and thinking he’s cliche, but that’s simply because he invented the things that would later become cliche in the hands of lesser writers, but even so, I think everyone can appreciate the sweep and power of his writing. This is simply good sword and sorcery writing.

The second paragraph seems born from the supplementary writing that REH had been doing. He’s obviously been thinking a lot about the geography and history of his secondary world, inspired by Farnsworth Wright to elaborate and develop some coherency for his fantasy setting. Now Howard never got into the depths of codification than Tolkien did; that’s a good thing in my opinion, since he had neither the expertise nor the time that Tolkien did to do a job of that size. Also, honestly, I think Howard’s rough-sketch or thumbnailed approach is actually much richer and more productive than the strict and set-in-stone “series bible” that a lot of later fantasy writers use. I mean, Howard apparently never even made a map until some fans wrote and asked for one, and I think that kind of hazy uncertainty, in addition to having much more verisimilitude, also gives a lot more freedom to the writer. Howard could slap Conan into a high seas galleons-and-pirates adventure one story and then drop him into a ziggurat full of demon-worshipers the next, and that’s important to the freshness of a series of short stories helmed by the same character. Maybe a novel requires more secondary world discipline, although if so I’d say that’s yet another point in favor of my “short story is the superior prose format” argument.

The other thing that strikes you immediately in that second paragraph is the very obvious racial/ethnonationalist reductionism that Howard uses. The Zamorans are all dark and guileful, there’s a very uncomfortably described Shemitish counterfiter, there’re tawny-headed Gundermen, etc. It is important to acknowledge that Howard was 100% a dyed-in-the-wool and absolutely committed racist, and that it played a huge part in his writing and his world view. A lot has been made of Howard’s love of the barbarian and his belief, quite sincerely, that civilization was largely an accidental configuration of society, fragile and unstable and always temporary, and that the natural state of humanity was the noble savage. Civilization poisons the individual, makes them soft and sneaky and duplicitous and decadent, and part of that decadence for Howard is the mingling of races, both socially and, horror of horrors for a white southerner like him, reproductively.

Equally important for Howard is his belief in a Spencerian hierarchy of the races, meaning that all barbarians are not created equally. The Cimmerians, Conan’s people, represent the highest and best of the barbarians – white, rough, hardy, savage but with an inborn sense of fair-play and nobility about them. Next down the hierarchy for Howard are the Picts who, in the Conan stories, are basically an early 20th century pop cultural expression of the Native Americans, almost as good as a white barbarian but given over to superstition and cruelty. It is notable that Howard never introduced a black barbarian, and even in the stories where Conan is running around the fantastical precursor of modern Africa, the northern barbarian’s woodcraft, survival skills, and martial prowess always trump the natives, even in the depths of their own home territories. As an aside, let me pause here to plug the late Charles Saunder’s “Imaro” and “Dossouye” series of books, truly great sword-and-sorcery by a black writer who loved the genre and also thought deeply and insightfully about its history, politics, and shortcomings.

But it’s important to recognize that this racism is a big part of Howard’s writing, and it will not be going away – it is integral to how he envisions the world and creates his stories, even more so than in the works of his friend and fellow racist, Lovecraft. And here, where Howard has begun to really think about the world of Conan, those beliefs and prejudices are getting baked into Hyboria.

But anyway, let us continue. Our synoptic view of The Maul narrows down to a specific corner of a specific bar, where a Kothic slaver is giggling sloppily about the Brythunian girl he’s going to kidnap and sell into sexual slavery in Ophir – grim stuff!

And it is this mention of the Elephant Tower that causes the ears of a tall barbarian youth to perk up…

That’s our boy for sure, but this is a much different Conan than the readers’ of Weird Tales were used to. The previous stories had centered on Conan the King, a middle aged, experienced, and supremely confident ruler and warrior king. This is a youth, seemingly fresh from Cimmeria and perhaps experiencing for the first time the decadent and dangerous cities of the south. I think this is also the only time Conan is described as having an accent, a signifier of both his inexperience and his barbaric foreignness.

ALSO I might as well point out here the loving and expressive attention paid to Conan’s body, a hallmark of Howard’s sword-and-sorcery in particular. Howard’s interest in masculinity and the body is clear in all his work, but with Conan in particular it’s an important part of the stories. For one thing, diegetically it’s the key to how he makes his living; Conan as warrior, thief, and survivor relies on his body above all else, and its stamina, its strength, and its smooth and powerful functioning are all central to his adventures. Secondly, it’s a signifier of his barbarity; his body is hard and lean and disciplined from his life and background; his strength is inherent and native to his body, which is very different from the civilized people in the stories, who are either soft and weak from easy living or who, it is implied, must train and work and practice to attain physical fitness in spite of their surroundings. This is a key difference, because again, for Conan, his strength, his muscular coordination, and his reflexes are all natural, honed from the life-or-death struggle that is a barbarian’s lot. No amount of training or expertise or practice can ever match it, because even the most diligent body-builder or swordsman or thief is, at core, artificially attempting to mimic what is pure and natural to the barbarian. Finally, it’s worth pointing out the homoeroticism inherent here. I’ve never done it, but an analysis of Howard’s use of superlatives and adjectives to describe specific characters would be extremely telling; even in stories with women characters, dollars to donuts Howard lavishes at least twice as much ink on Conan’s broad hairy chest and mighty thews as on heaving bosoms and curvaceous hips. I’m not saying Howard was gay, but I am saying that it is clear from the stories that what he is interested in is masculinity, pure and simple, it’s perceived strength and ruggedness and the way it’s expressed in the idealized masculine form.

Lotta damn theorizin’ and philosphizin’ there, sorry! Let’s get back to the damn story!

This young barbarian, still unintroduced formally, has heard this the man’s strange statement, and wants to know what is the secret of the Elephant Tower? The Kothic slaver, well in his cups and enjoying the role of an in-the-know city slicker, decides to set this rube from the sticks straight.

Heedless of his danger, our Kothic drunkard gets on his high horse and deigns to explain to this Cimmerian hick that Zamora is the City of Thieves, and if someone could have stolen the Heart of the Elephant then it would already have been done. But Yara the Priest, whose magic is unparalleled, guards his prize with both steel and dangerous sorcery. But what of climbing the tower and coming in from above, asks the Cimmerian?

The threat of a fight sends the crowd surging backwards, and the single candle illuminating the scene is snuffed out. Chaos erupts, there’s shouting and screaming and a single strident yell…and when the candle is relit the barbarian is gone and the Kothic slaver lies dead, ripped open by a sword stroke unerringly delivered in the dark.

I’ve spent a LOT of time on this first section because I think it warrants it. First of all, it’s just great, thrilling stuff, full of flavor and rich descriptions that really capture the scene; it’s very visceral and exciting! But also, I think this is a key moment in sword and sorcery’s history. Remember, the previous Conan stories have been set later in his life, as a King, and while there’s some great blood-and-thunder stuff there for sure, it’s here in this opening section of the Tower of the Elephant that we are introduced to the very first Barbarian Hero in the whole of the genre, and the way it’s done is so important and impactful on what would come later that it warrants some attention.

The good stuff continues in the next section, where Conan is striding towards to the temple district and the Tower of the Elephant, reflecting on his time among civilized people. It’s pure undiluted barbarian hero backstory, and it’s great:

In particular, that last line summing up barbarian theology is basically a primer on both Howard’s view of the world as well as sword and sorcery as a genre – it’s all about a character alone and armed only with their courage and willpower taking on the world!

Conan (or, rather, the Cimmerian, because he hasn’t YET been named in this story) arrives at the Tower of the Elephant, a silvery spire with glassy outer walls and rimmed with gems that dominates the Zamoran skyline. It’s from here that Yara the Priest dwells and performs his strange magical rites.

Just fantastic evil magic stuff, really hammering home how this weird and mysterious force is quintessentially and elementally is opposed to the clean and natural strength of a barbarian. It’s also fun to see the inexplicableness of the tower AND gem’s names…they’re just named after Elephants, for some reason, and no one knows or remembers why. While Conan is musing on all this, he suddenly hears a noise from beyond the outer – the sound of someone tromping by. A guard, Conan thinks, but instead of hearing him come by again on his patrol, all is silent within.

Succumbing to his curiosity (and avarice), Conan clambers easily over the wall and drops down into the first of the inner rings surrounding the Tower. This one is wide and mostly open, with only some shrubberies near the far inner wall. Gliding pantherishly, Conan makes his way towards that inner wall, when he stumbles across the dead body of solider who has been strangled from behind. Somewhat unnerved by the uncanniness of the murder, Conan continues forward cautiously, his sword drawn and his senses alert. He spies a strange bulk near the wall, a shadowy figure who, somehow (and perhaps for the only time in any of these stories) actually hears Conan’s stealthy approach. The shape whirls around, resolving itself into a big-bellied but strangely lithe man!

There, finally, is Conan’s name. And we’re introduced to one of the first in a long-line of important and entertaining side characters in a Conan story. In this one its Taurus of Nemedia, the Prince of Thieves, but it could just as well be Balthus from “Beyond the Black River” or “Murilo” from “Rogues in the House.” Actually, it’s kind of interesting, but the very best Conan stories generally have a strong secondary character; Conan doesn’t have a lot of interiority, honestly, so it’s useful to have another POV that lets the reader see both Conan and how he fits into the world at the same time. Also, mechanically, it’s handy to have someone who can throw out exposition or explanations, which Taurus of Nemedia does here.

He quickly explains that Yara’s defenses rely on what lies beyond the inner wall, in the second garden. The human guards, like the man he killed, all hunker down for the night behind sealed doors in the lower chambers of the tower, leaving the garden to be defended by deadly, nonhuman sentinels. It’s these that baffled Taurus for so long, but he’s figured out some kind of scheme or plan for taking care of them. Once they’re neutralized, they’ll climb the tower, enter through the roof, murder Yara and take his Gem. Easy peasy!

Conan and his new best friend hop the wall and land in a lush inner garden. Conan prepares to stride forward, but Taurus, tense and on edge, pushes him back and tells him that, as he values his life, he must stay behind him. They wait; everything is silent at first, and then there’s movement in the bushes and among the trees, and terrible blazing eyes suddenly glare out at them from the foliage!

It turns out Taurus had a tube full of black lotus powder, a horrifically toxic substance that kills with the merest whiff. As an aside, Howard’s reliance on lotuses in these stories is really one of my favorite things. The black lotus shows up a lot, as does a white and (I think) a yellow lotus, all with strange and mysterious powers and properties. It’s a lot of fun, and puts Howard in a lineage with Homer and the Odyssey, as far as strange botanicals go.

Conan gets to display his prowess by killing one more lion with his sword, and then he and Taurus get to the tower itself, a metallic mass with smooth, glassy sides, seemingly unclimbable. But the wily Prince of Thieves has a solution to this problem, too!

Sometimes it seems like sword and sorcery is as much a genre about climbing as anything else – it’s such a common way to demonstrate the hero’s prowess, strength, courage, tenacity, AND their connection to wild landscapes and untamed nature. Of course a Cimmerian can climb like a cat, they live in a rocky, hilly landscape of towering precipices and foreboding cliffs! Taurus and Conan get to the tower, and that’s when Taurus gets a little tricksy. He tells Conan to go to the edge of the tower and check to see if the guards are alert. Conan is no dummy and thinks its an odd request, but he complies, and while he does Taurus slips in through the door, leaving his buddy behind. I guess he’s decided that he doesn’t want to share the spoils with Conan, but it doesn’t work out so well for our Nemedian Prince of Thieves:

With a gurgle and a dumb look on his face, poor ol’ Taurus dies, apparently without even knowing what it was that had killed him! Examining his late compatriot’s body, Conan discovers a wound on the base of Taurus’s neck, like three nails that had been driven in and then pulled out. Already the edges of these marks are turning black, and there’s a faint smell of putrefaction. Cautiously Conan prods the door open, and inside the chamber he sees a bunch of fainting couches and several chests full of glittering gems. Already he’s found more wealth than he could’ve imagined existed in all the world! But, while he’s contemplating it, the guardian of the chamber attacks!

It’s a good ol’ fashioned giant spider fight, an encounter appropriate for one level 3-5 barbarian! Again, a little cliched now, but remember, Howard was writing this stuff in 1933! Give him a break! Besides, it’s a fun fight – the spider is super nimble, and it’s fun to think of it swinging through the chamber, trying sink its venomous fangs into Conan. When that doesn’t work, the spider then starts darting all around, roping off the chamber with thick cords of rough, sticky webbing that threatens to trap Conan. Finally, unable to come to grips with the monster using his sword, Conan lifts a huge chest full of gems and splatters the big crawlie with it. It’s neat!

Conan is nothing if not dogged, and despite the fact that he’s twice now encountered a king’s ransom in gems just lying around, he’s committed to finding the Heart of the Elephant. After all, if Yara was willing to just leave chests of gems sitting around in his rumpus room, imagine what the Heart must be like! So on he goes, venturing through the door and deeper into the silent, uncanny tower. Eventually he finds a huge ivory door with strange markings on it. He enters, and sees something truly strange:

An elephant headed horror sits enthroned in this strange chamber, and its no mere idol…it’s a living thing! Conan is horrified, struck dumb and seemingly paralyzed by what can only be an elder demon of the old world. But then, Conan notices that the great amber eyes stare out blankly, and the trunk of the thing grope forward…the monster on the throne is blind. And then, it speaks with an unearthly voice!

It’s both a surprising reveal and an honestly moving bit of writing; Conan’s realization that this thing which he had been so horrified at has been made to suffer, has in fact been tortured, moves him to both deep pity and profound shame.

Possessed of senses beyond humankind, the elephant-heading thing senses that Conan has killed this evening, up to and including the man in the tavern. And it also knows that a man lies died above at the top of the tower. These two deaths seem to have some occult significance for the thing, who begins to share its story with Conan, explaining that he and others like him had come from a weird green planet called Yag, rebels against their king there. Seeking refuge on earth their wings withered and so they came to live in the primordial world, warring against the prehuman monsters that dwelt there. They conquered, and watched humans rise from ape-dom to the kingdoms of Valusia and Atlantis, and they saw the cataclysm that swallowed those ancient lands and gave rise to the world of Conan and his people. One by one his people died throughout the long ages, until only he, Yag-Kosha, was left, worshipped as a god far in the east. But it was there that Yara found him and, feigned to be his acolyte, learned magic from Yag-Kosha. But, like all evil wizards, he wanted to know Dark Sorcery, which Yag-Kosha would not teach him. Using forbidden magic he’d learned in Stygia, Yara was able to trap and enslave Yag-Kosha, forcing him to use his magic to fulfill Yara’s every whim.

Conan takes up the gem, a great clear crimson crystal, the Heart of the Elephant. Yag-Kosha has a plan, and Conan is now a part of it.

It’s really good, and Yag-Kosha’s story and in particular his speech here is some great, eldritch stuff, truly weird and unearthly and hinting at much stranger stuff. It also nicely demonstrates the importance of weirdness in sword-and-sorcery (which is, of course, a subgenre of the larger genre of weird fiction). Rather than just pure supernaturalism, Yag-Kosha is, basically, a Lovecraftian alien-god, made of different stuff and possessing alien powers, sure, but in a way that’s consistent with a vision of a material (if strange and magical) universe.

Conan complies with Yag-Kosha’s wishes, cutting out its heart and then squeezing the blood onto the gem, where it gets soaked up, like a sponge. As he’s leaving, he senses that there’s something strange and marvelous going on with Yag-Kosha’s remains, but he averts his eyes, not sure whether he could safely witness it.

The gem has become murky and pulses with a strange power that seems to draw and trap Yara’s attention. The wizard stoops over and grips the gem, staring into its depths, and Conan realizes with a start that the wizard is shrinking. Soon he is no larger than a child, and its only when he’s baby-sized and standing on the table that the evil sorcerer seems to realize his danger. He drops the gem and tries to flee, but some kind of weird magnetism has trapped him; he can only run in ever tightening circles around the jewel, drawing closer and closer with each circuit. Eventually, big as a mouse, Yara ends up atop the gem, and then his final doom comes upon him:

Conan turns and hauls ass out of the tower, running downward through the lower halls, seeing the guard room full of suddenly and mysteriously killed guards. Yag-Kosha had said the way would be made clear for him, and if there’s one thing weird elephant-headed space gods are, it’s honest. Conan finds it all to be a bit too much though, and decides to get out of Dodge:

And, with that crashing apocalyptic collapse, so ends “The Tower of the Elephant.”

It’s really almost the perfect sword-and-sorcery tale, inventive and thrilling and action-packed, but also moody and contemplative and a little sad. There’s real cosmic sorrow in Yag-Kosha, and Conan’s sense of humankind’s collective shame for his imprisonment is particularly poignant; it’s probably the most introspective Conan ever gets, unfortunately. Don’t get me wrong, there’re some truly great Conan stories yet to come, full of great ideas and inventive plots and fun characters, but I really think that this is my favorite of the series. It’s so effortlessly fun (and weird!), and it really lays out what makes for great sword-and-sorcery. It’s been a lot of fun re-reading it and thinking about it, and I hope ya’ll have enjoyed both it AND my ridiculously wordy musings about it too. Anyway, stay tuned, we’re only half-way through Sword and Sorcery month, and I’m thinkin’ I’ll do a fun one for the solstice next week. See ya’ll then!

Straining the Pulp beneath my sandaled feet #16: “Rattle of Bones” by Robert E. Howard, Weird Tales June 1929, V.13 n.6

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Gathered ’round the red glow of the fire at night, its feeble flame keeping wolves (and worse…) at bay while we discuss the weighty topic of The Pulps, one name looms larger than all others, a name of ancient renown steeped in glory and deep lore: the Man from Cross Plains himself, Robert E. Howard. And while I don’t want to get bogged down JUST talking about him, it is the fact that, in addition to basically creating the genre that Fritz Lieber would later name “Sword and Sorcery,” ol’ REH is also one of its indisputable masters, having written some of the best examples of the genre ever. So, while we ARE going to be eventually talking about OTHER people, there will be at least THREE of these pieces that focus on my fellow Texan, Big Bob Howard. And for today, that story is “Rattle of Bones” from the June 1929 issue of Weird Tales.

That’s right, we’re saving Conan for later and STARTING with Howard’s first indisputably successful series-spanning character, the two-fisted, sword-swinging, berserker-Puritan himself, Solomon Kane! I’ve always liked Kane (shame about the movie though…) and I think he’s an important step in Howard’s career. In addition to being a real recurring character, he also seems to have helped Howard crystalize some of his ideas about what he was interested in as a writer, per say.

But wait, I can hear you saying, didn’t I *just* say last time that sword and sorcery wasn’t created until the Conan story “The Phoenix and The Sword” was published in 1932!? What’s this 1929 story doing here in Sword and Sorcery month!? Read on, O Prince (or Princess, as the case may be)!

Leading up to this issue of Weird Tales, Howard was already an established writer: his first professional story ever was “Spear and Fang” from ’25 in Weird Tales, a lusty, action-packed caveman yarn that was extremely well-received. He wrote some more traditional, gothic-style horror tales, in particular “Wolfshead” in ’26, which was another huge success with the readers of Weird Tales and established him as a talent in Farnsworth Wright’s stable of writers. All of these stories are very much in the vein of Howard’s early horror writing, tortured protagonists struggling manfully against a hostile world full of occult threats, rich in historical (or prehistorical) trappings and settings. Importantly, he has introduced the Picts in “The Lost Race” from 1927; these dark, gnomish figures of a forgotten age who lurk in the twilight on the edge of our world are, for Howard, a synecdoche. They represent all of his literary preoccupations: civilization and barbarism, history drenched landscapes, violence, empire, decadence, atavism, and race. While these previous stories are very much still in the weird fiction tradition, focused on moody reflections of doom-laden fate and ancient knowledge, they are nonetheless grasping towards what would eventually become sword and sorcery, where weird horrors exist to be confronted rather than merely suffered. And Kane, as a brave and violent character that can appear in different stories and different settings over and over again, is an important part of bridging that gap from the early “weird fiction” Howard to the “blood and thunder” Howard that we know and love later.

That’s a long preamble, so we’ll save REH biography talk for later. Now, let’s take a look at this issue of Weird Tales!

An excellent and very risque cover from Hugh Rankin, illustrating (vaguely) a scene from a Jules de Grandin story by Seabury Quinn. It’s got a great, almost art deco style cover to it, doesn’t it, and the nearly naked woman is particularly stylish and evocative (he said, looking respectfully). Probably way more interesting that the story it’s illustrating, I’m sure – Quinn was a HUGELY popular writer at Weird Tales, surpassing Lovecraft at this point, and his occult detective Jules de Grandin was one of the most popular characters in the magazine. The stories themselves are perfectly fine, but it’s always baffled me HOW bonkers people were for them back then. Changing tastes, I guess. Anyway, the ToC:

Not TOO much to write home about in this issue – Derleth and Whitehead are very much second-stringers in the Lovecraft Circle, and the big names at the time were definitely Quinn and Hamilton; they’re right up right up front in this issue, with a bullet. Howard is comfortably in the middle of the issue, and Wright took particular care to call out that “Rattle of Bones” is a Solomon Kane story; they’d given Howard’s first Kane story, “Red Shadows,” a cover earlier in 1928, and there’d been a second Kane story earlier in 1929, so they’re working hard to make sure people know that this is a recurring character. So let’s get into it, shall we!

Unique typesetting on the title this time, huh? It spreads across two pages too, but there’s just one word over there on the second page, kind of spaced weirdly. The title font is only used for this story in this issue, which is interesting. Weird Tales was always financially strapped, generally just skating by, so I kind of wonder if they were trying to get some visual interest on the cheap here? But, that’s not to say that they couldn’t afford an illustration!

Ah yes, Weird Tales, the magazine never afraid to spoil a story with an illustration right off the goddamn bat. Of course, this one isn’t the worst offender, but still, c’mon ya’ll, let a story breath, would ya?

Efficient and evocative, Howard wastes no time here. Two men travelling through the dark, silent, shadowy black forest approach the Tavern of the Cleft Skull. The landlord is suspicious, and demands to know who these guys wandering the deep forest are. One is, of course, the English Puritan Solomon Kane, and the other is a Frenchman with the unlikely name of Gaston l’Armon. The sullen, suspicious, secretive landlord lets them in, and we get a brief description of our characters: Kane is a goth, all in black with a black featherless hat that sets of his pallid, intense face. Gaston is of a different sort entirely; he’s very much a French Poppinjay, all in lace and finery. And our landlord?

So he’s obviously a deeply sinister motherfucker, even without that last little “few come twice,” thing which, I mean, jeez man. Way to give away the game, although when you have two small red eyes that stare unblinkingly at people, maybe there’s not much dissembling to do? Kane and l’Armon finish up their meal and head on up to bed.

This is a pretty short story with pretty spare descriptions, but I think Howard uses his words to good effect here – the wavering shadows on the walls of the long dark hall and the broad, stocky body of the weird innkeeper shambling ahead of them…it’s a really nice picture, the sparse language helping to convey the silence and the stillness and the emptiness of the Inn of the Cleft Skull.

Inside their room, Kane notices that there isn’t a bar for the lock. There’s a bit of banter between l’Armon and Kane, and we learn that the two of them met by chance a mere hour before coming across this lonely inn out in the middle of the German black forest. Still, they decide that they might like to be able to lock their door, so they go out in search of a bolt in one of the other rooms. This trope of an inn as a trap, and in particular one where the trapping is done via locks (or the absence of them) appears in two other big famous stories. One is Howard’s Conan story “Shadows in Zamboula” from 1935 (a good but controversial story that showcases some of the worst of Howard’s casual racism) and, interestingly, it plays a major part in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” from 1931 (where it precipitates one of the few action scenes in a Lovecraft, actually). It’s an effective bit of horror stuff, though – vulnerable and unprotected in your sleep, not even a locked door between you and whatever threat is out there…it’s spooky stuff! Kane and l’Armon agree that they’d like to be able to lock the door, so they set off to search the other empty rooms of the inn for a bar to lock their door with. But, they find them all similarly unlockable. And then they come to the very last room at the faaaaaaar end of the dark hallway.

They find the Inn’s murder room which of course we were all expecting. Bloodstained floors, smashed furniture, and even a secret passage!

That’s pretty wild, huh? The inn keeper cleaves some poor bastard’s head clean through AND THEN chains up his corpse in a secret chamber? Confronted with the evidence of their murderous host’s past actions and his immanent threat to them, what do they do? They start screwin’ around with the skeleton, of course:

Perfectly normal thing to say, Gaston l’Armon, I’m sure it’ll have no bearing whatsoever on the rest of the story! But Kane has had enough; he wants to confront the innkeeper with the evidence of his crimes! He turns, preparing to leave, when the unthinkable happens!

Betrayed! And now Kane recognizes him…he’s Gaston the Butcher, a famously murderous brigand! He had planned to murder Kane in the night, the treacherous dog, but a chance came along and he took it! Now he’s going to kill Kane and take his gold. It’s a solid plan, simple and straightforward, and Kane seems to be facing his imminent death (and at the hands of a Frenchman, no less) when, suddenly…

That’s right! Looming up behind Gaston in the hallway, the inn keeper cleaves himself another skull, thereby saving (albeit briefly, as we’ll see) Solomon Kane’s life! By the way, the “hanger” that the innkeeper uses to chop Gaston’s head open is a type of sword, a very short sabre that was popular with woodsmen and hunters before making the jump to the navy and artillery officers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s called a hanger for the way it hanged from the belt.

Kane moves forward, but is quickly menaced back by the innkeeper, who has a long-barreled pistol in his OTHER hand. If it’s not one thing it’s another, you know what I mean?

First off all, the innkeeper is a nice and effective example of escalation, one of the staples of adventure literature. Gaston was bad, sure, but now Kane is face with a worse threat, a man driven to murderous insanity by the brutality of a Continental prison. The line, “And deep in my brain, the wounds of the years…” is really great, and it instantly turns the Host of the Inn of the Cleft Skull into something wilder and weirder and more tragic than a simple homicidal maniac. He’s been broken irrevocably, to the point that he’s now hiding out in the woods and waging a murderous war on all humanity. It’s great stuff, real dire threat.

But what, you ask, of sorcery? Well, there’s that strange sound again. Gaston had heard something scrabbling around in the chamber with the shackled skeleton, noises that Kane had dismissed as rats bothering dry bones. But the innkeeper has a different interpretation of the sound.

The madman continues with his ranting, explaining that the skeleton had belonged to a Russian sorcerer who had stopped at the inn and whom he had, of course, killed. But the wizard had vowed that his dead body would rise up and avenge him, so the Innkeeper stripped his bones and shackled his skeleton to the floor in the secret chamber. “His sorcery was not powerful enough to save him from me, but all men know that a dead magician is more evil than a living one,” says the innkeeper, sidling around to check on his prisoner.

I mean, that’s a great scene, isn’t it? A door to death yawning wide, then the man suddenly toppling backwards in a panic! A gust of wind that snuffs out the candle and shuts the door to the secret room where, sealed away, all Kane can hear is muffled screaming and the rattle of bones! Just top notch stuff, really simple and direct and effective. Kane kindles a light and sees a sight that horrifies him:

And that’s the end of the story!

So, first thing first, this is definitely a horror story, and not even a particularly weird one – there’s nothing cosmic or mind-bending about the monster here…it’s a wizard’s skeleton, and it literally just strangles a guy to death. In fact, the Innkeeper is a much weirder threat; he’s been brutalized so thoroughly that he’s lost all humanity, becoming an engine of destruction and murder who lays in wait for any and all who happen to come his way.

Similarly, the proto-sword and sorcery elements might seem to be thin on the ground here. Kane is mostly held at gunpoint the whole story, and he doesn’t even get a weapon of his own until the very last bit of the story. He doesn’t fight anybody or anything, and mostly just watches as the events of the story unfold around him. In fact, if you haven’t read the previous two Kane stories, you might be a little skeptical of the whole “Kane is a sword-and-sorcery hero” thing here (it’s much clearer in those stories, though – he’s sword-fighting and ranging all over the place in those, and generally a lot more active and dynamic than here, as well as menaced by sorcery and horrors).

But! I think that this story nicely illustrates Howard’s changing direction and the way he’s developing a distinct aesthetic. First of all, there’s an interesting use of the environment. The black forest setting is gloomy and threatening, and this ramshackle inn with a terrible name is, rather than a welcome sign of civilization in a wilderness, actually much wilder and more lonely than the woods themselves. The threats of the forest, wolves and weather and such, are after all natural, while the canker of the inn is wholly unnatural, a blight on the face of the earth. And the origins of that blight are sunk in the brutal degradation that Man visits of His Fellow Man, which is a very Howardian perspective that underpins many of the Conan stories.

You’re also beginning, I think, to see the tell-tale interest in the specific settings and materiality that makes for good sword and sorcery. Howard is always interested in making you believe that the places he’s setting his stories are real; now, that might be easier when the place IS real, like the black forest, but the work he’s doing is still substantial – after all, he’s just said “black forest” and “Germany,” it’s not like he’s providing an in-depth primer on the socio-economics of Baden-Württemberg. BUT I think there is an obvious interest in conveying that this landscape is real, and that the people and places in it are historically contingent. By playing around with those ideas in stories like this one, he’s practicing for the quick but evocative realizations that he’ll need to make Aquilonia or Turania seem like real places with real histories and economies and cultures, the sort of backgrounding that makes the Conan stories work.

There’s also a brutality to the characters that is interesting and important. The innkeeper, who is insane, is certainly a grim enough fellow, but Gaston’s depravity might be even worse. After all, the innkeeper at least has an ethos, man, but Gaston is straight up just a greedy murderer. Both of them have been degraded and turned into monsters, in fact; the innkeeper by a cruel and crude “justice” and Gaston by his own avarice. In the Kane stories, it’s implied that he is a volcanic, passionate man whose natural tendencies are kept in check not by his strict Puritanism but rather by his single-minded obsession with his own ideas of justice and righteous violence. In fact, over the course of the stories, you could very easily say that Kane is very similar to the poor mad murderous innkeeper, the only difference being that Kane’s endless war is being directed at the right people, brigands and murderers and inhuman monsters. That kind of psychological depth, and in particular the emphasis on the darker side of human beings, is certainly one of the poles holding up the sword and sorcery tent, and it’s in the Kane stories that Howard really starts to explore it.

I obviously really like this story – in fact, it might be my favorite Kane story. Don’t get me wrong, there’s good swash-buckling in a bunch of ’em, although you do have to prepare yourself for Howard’s paternalistic take on Africa for a lot of them (“Wings in the Night” is probably worth a read, though). And Kane is probably Howard’s first Great character, a dynamic and forceful and interesting personality, a Puritan who is, actually, a Barbarian hero, subject to gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirths. And while it’s short and Kane doesn’t get to do much in it, I still like the tone and mood of this piece – it’s a horror story, yes, much more so than sword-and-sorcery, but it’s almost there too, just teetering on the edge of a new genre. I think it really is a good key to understanding the evolution of Howard’s writing and thinking, and how all of, his interest in history and civilization and people, is going to blossom very soon into something special and epochal.

End of Moorevember #15: Sword and Sorcery edition! “The Black God’s Kiss” by C.L. Moore, Weird Tales Oct 1934 (v.24, n.4)

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CONTENT WARNING: the story we’re talking about today includes sexual assault.

The Yuletide draws nigh, and for me, that means one thing: sword and sorcery! Growing up, for some reason or another, I would often find myself reading fantasy novels around this time of year; Lord of the Rings, The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Book of the New Sun, big fat books that travelled well for holiday trips and suchlike. But one day I picked up a Fritz Lieber Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser collection, and ever since my xmas time fantasy reading has bent towards the sword-and-sorcery end of the spectrum. That might not be too surprising given that sword-and-sorcery is a subgenre of weird fiction anyway. But it’s decidedly my favorite flavor of fantasy, so it’s a unique pleasure to be able to end Moorevember and begin my annual sword-and-sorcery appreciation month with the very first Jirel of Joiry story from one of the genre’s masters, C.L. Moore! That’s right…it’s “The Black God’s Kiss” from Weird Tales, October 1934.

It’s gonna be wall-to-wall adventuring around here from now through January so we’ll talk the history of sword and sorcery as a genre later, but to lay some groundwork for you: sword and sorcery is the ONE genre that people all definitively agree began in Weird Tales. Specifically, we can point to the publication in December 1932 of the Conan story “The Phoenix and the Sword” as its definitive birthdate. It’s not the first fantasy in the magazine, of course; some of Lovecraft’s dreamlands stories veer dangerously close to the genre, Clark Ashton Smith had already published a number of fantasy-flavored horror stories (including, importantly, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” in ’31), and REH had even had a couple of “King Kull” stories in the 20s in Weird Tales, but for most people the genre crystalized in ’32 with that Conan story. Mostly that’s because Conan as a character would come to dominate the genre, but I think there’re good literary reasons to pin it there too. A lot of the weird fantasy that had appeared previously was, mostly, very much more in the weird fiction tradition, focusing on horror or mood or lyricism; even Howard’s Kull stories were more mythic than anything else, with very little of the action or adventure we associate with classic S&S. Also, with the Conan story, we get a glimpse at the first really well developed “secondary world” in literature, a pseudo-historical approach to presenting fantastic lands as real political entities with histories and agendas and material concerns, rather than as timeless magical kingdoms. But perhaps most importantly, Howard’s Conan represents the first clear articulation of the central theme of sword and sorcery: a singular human character relying on their strength and cunning in an active struggle with unnatural and dangerously inhuman forces.

The 80s sword and sorcery revival (and backlash), particularly in the movies, has given us a very jaundiced and cynical view of the genre; you say “sword n’sorcery” and what most people envision is a meat-headed barbarian carving his way through a sea of enemies, followed by some gratuitous sex with an uncomfortably exoticized dancing girl. And I mean, sure, that’s a part of it, but in the finest examples of the genre, what you actually have is a story about a person confronting dangers with only themselves (and, in particular, their bodies) to rely on. It’s a literature preoccupied with the ways a person will push their strength, will, and courage to the limits in pursuit of a goal, despite the presence of weird inhuman threats.

That this had an appeal to both readers and writers of weird fiction is understandable, I think…even the most dyed-in-the-wool weird horror fan must eventually confront the fact that, sometimes, you want to see someone punch a gibbering horror right in its non-euclidian face, and that’s precisely the itch Sword and Sorcery scratches. The horrors are real and chilling and soul-shattering in S&S, but not every protagonist has to be a Lovecraftian character that embraces merciful oblivion by fainting at the most narratively convenient moment. And as we know from our very first entry in this year’s Moorevember, that kind of tough, no-nonsense character was something C.L. Moore specialized in writing! So let’s get to it!

Moore got the cover for this story, and it’s one of Brundage’s most famous pieces. The strange, enigmatical expression of the statue is really good, and while Brundage has of course cheesecaked up Jirel of Joiry (giving her longer and more feminine hair and putting her in lingerie), I think the picture actually does a good job at capturing some of the weirdness of Moore’s story. I wonder if there are any interviews or letters from Moore where she says what she thought of the cover?

The ToC this issue is pretty solid, too:

It’s a sword-and-sorcery smorgasbord! Moore, followed immediately by a great Hyperborean story from Clark Ashton Smith (which includes a wizard with an archaeopteryx familiar) AND there’s also the second part (of three) of a pretty great Conan tale (also with some of the raddest evil wizards he ever wrote)! Great fantasy stuff here, plus more straightforward weird fic from Ernst, Wellman, and Julius Long…hell of an issue, honestly!

The esteem that Wright and the readers felt for Moore is evident from a nifty (and atypical) little sidebar that was inserted on the first full page of text from the story. Here it is:

Some incredible praise, and puts Moore right in there with truly towering figures of weird literature. It also illustrates just how epochal “Shambleau” was for the magazine and the genre. A real shame that she ever fell off the radar of readers, since she’s absolutely one of the major writers of genre fiction from the early 20th century.

Big giant title illustration that, along with the italicized caption, UNFORTUNELY undercuts the beginning of the story by giving away the fact that Jirel of Joiry is, in fact a woman. It’s a real shame, because Moore clearly begins the story with the idea of surprising the Weird Tales audience with that fact:

Not until the fifth paragraph is Jirel identified as “Joiry’s lady,” after descriptions that paint “Joiry’s tall commander” as martial, physically powerful, and very defiant. It’s a shame that Weird Tales undercuts the reveal with the art and the intro, although hopefully some readers had sped through that and encountered the surprise naturally. It’s a great scene, one of the iconic gender reveals in literature, right up there with Éowyn confronting the Witch-King of Angmar.

Guillaume is, of course, struck by the sudden sight of this warrior woman, one who by his own admission put up a truly valiant fight against him and his men. It’s kind of funny that he besieged Joiry and went through all that without knowing who it was he was facing, isn’t it? Guess he was busy, what with the pillaging and conquest and all. And this leads into the scene that warranted the trigger warning above, because he demands a kiss from his captive. The immediate result is that Jirel curses him out and, despite having her hands bound, lashes out with her spurred boots and her knees and elbows, walloping the men holding her and even succeeding in briefly braking free. But Guillaume descends from his captured throne, grabs her, and forcibly kisses her.

Jirel is a grade-A badass, though, trying to fucking bite him to death like that. But she’s knocked unconscious and dragged away to what had been her own dungeons.

Pausing briefly, let’s talk about the sexual assault here. This is the only actually portrayed assault in the story, though the implied threat of rape looms large in the story and is explicitly discussed a little later; still, I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not meant to be titillating to the reader, but rather is described as an actual and serious affront to Jirel’s person and dignity. Similarly, Jirel’s reaction is not typical for a woman in a pulp story facing an outrage like this; she is furious, and tries to kill Guillaume with her goddamn teeth, after all. We’ll talk about it more at the end, but I think it’s important to note that Jirel’s actions in the story are motivated by this assault, much more so than the simple fact that she lost her castle and position. Just keep that in mind as we read on.

Jirel wakes from her stupor in a lightless dungeon deep beneath her castle. She surveys the room in the dark, feeling her way along the edge of the room and finding a small wooden stool which will serve her as a weapon. Then, action-oriented as always, she makes her move:

Jirel creeps through her silent castle carefully, wracked with furious hate at the memory of Guilliaume and the kiss. Jirel, like all true sword and sorcery heroes, is always a hair’s breadth away from titanic berserker rages, and it’s only with effort that she forces her volcanic fury back down into the pit of her stomach. A plan is forming, as told by a wolfish grin she wears as she seeks out her rooms.

The Roman greaves are a nice touch, and help situate us in time and place (even if it doesn’t make a lot of strict sense). Between the name of Guillaume and the “not long past” days of Rome, we’re in France, although there’s definitely more of a high medieval feel to Jirel and her adventures than, say, a Merovingian setting. But still, there are two important points here. First, we’re in a savage age of warlords, lawlessness, and violence, the kind of thing that arises after the fall of an orderly and powerful Empire like Rome. Secondly and much more importantly, I’d argue that this brief scene subverts the important fantasy trope of the Chivalric Hero’s arming ceremony, and is in some ways the first clear and explicit articulation of sword-and-sorcery’s difference from traditional fantasy.

A chivalric hero is defined their equipment – they bear armor and arms that, in addition to signifying social status and prestige, also serve to symbolically elevate and separate their heroes from the rest of the world. A chivalric hero encased in steel contrasts with and indeed rejects the softness and vulnerability of the human body, while also placing them within a milieu of honorable and romantic combat. Similarly, the investiture of a chivalric hero with their armor and often special or ancient weapon represents a numinous, spiritual aspect of their being; again, they are transformed into something more than human.

Contrast this with the hero of sword and sorcery – yes, they have armor and weapons, but they are interchangeable, tools to be used and discarded, mere accessories to the true strength of the the S&S hero, their body and its native, inherent strength and vitality. A chivalric hero is strong, of course, but their heroism is superhuman, signified by the rejection of the body in favor of a manufactured, expensive, and inhuman carapace of metal. The S&S hero embraces their (often admittedly nearly mythic) body. And here, in this scene, we have Jirel explicitly inverting the famous arming ceremony of chivalric romances – she is unattended, and must strip her battered armor off on her own, a difficult task that requires considerable effort and contortions to achieve. You can envision her casting off her grand gothic armor, all fluted edges and glittering layers, the sort of thing that takes a lot of people to put on and take off properly. And what does she replace it with? Doeskins, utilitarian chain mail, and the greaves of a dead empire. These are the trapping of a reaver rather than a grand and noble leader of men! I think it’s a key scene in the history of fantasy in general and sword-and-sorcery in particular, a masterful and efficient expression of a break with the romantic ideal, replacing it with a grim, brutal, and hard-boiled expression of rugged heroism instead.

Emerging from her room as a true sword-and-sorcery hero, Jirel creeps through her dark and silent castle, realizing that her enemies must have spent the night feasting and partying and are now probably sleeping it off. She briefly considers just wrecking their shit while they sleep, but she puts it aside – Guillaume must’ve left SOME sentries, and she figures she wouldn’t be able to kill him without getting captured. She’s got a different plan in mind. She seeks out her priest, Father Gervase, who is praying at his shrine.

Jirel could possibly flee, but she’s chosen a different path, one that horrifies her priest.

An important fact is revealed here: Jirel is not one of these virginal sword and sorcery heroines. It’s not sex per say that she fears; rather, it’s victimization that she is fighting against. That’s an important point, I think. We aren’t told explicitly what Jirel is up to, but it’s clearly a grim and perilous thing she plans to do. Gervase says he would rather give her up to Guillaume than see her do whatever it is she is planning to do, but she is resolute; she will make a deal with the devil himself for vengeance!

Shriven, Jirel descends again to the dungeons, this time seeking out a secret passage that only she and Father Gervase know about. Both had explored it some before, the priest farther than she, and it is a terrible, unearthly place, full or horror and inhuman evil, and it is into this that Jirel will venture! Just fantastic sword and sorcery stuff, isn’t it? And Moore, who has real keen eye for weirdness, really delivers here; Jirel enters a weird corkscrewing tunnel, experiencing strange sensations, altered gravity, and weird animate clouds of darkness that seem to emanate purest sorrow. It’s a great section, and Moore spends the time necessary to convey that Jirel is not merely crawling through a tunnel – she is leaving our world behind and going someplace else.

She reaches the end of the tunnel and feels an immensity around her, as if the tunnel had opened into a great and limitless space. Everything is still perfectly and oppressively dark around her, and she actually feels a constriction around her throat when she tries to step into it, nearly choking until she removes the crucifix at her throat. And while some may balk at the mundanity of a cross having some power over this place, I think it works on a different level – it is only when Jirel rejects this symbol of the normal world and casts it aside that she can see this new, strange world, a very thematically appropriate thing for the story.

First off, she’s crawled down a tunnel into another world – there’s a sky and stars and topography. That tunnel has led her out of the known world into some place very different from our own. And secondly, she’s immediately attack by a bunch of horrible little freaks gnashing at her heels. Her blade goes snicker-snack and she squishes a bunch of the gross little things, disgusted at the sensation of their bursting bodies. Then she steps out into this weird unearthly world, and discovers that the gravity is indeed different; she’s soon leaping with great bounding strides that would be impossible back home, speeding away across the plains towards a weird shaft of light that she’s spotted in the distance.

This is a long section, and I hope you have the patience to enjoy it; it’s basically a description of this weird-as-shit place and the strange, horrible things that live there. Strange pale naked women with sightless and senseless eyes leap froglike through a marsh, rivers murmur with terrible voices in alien languages, and other horrors abound. It’s a very Boschian vision of Hell, uncanny and very weird. Jirel eventually arrives at a the light, which turns out to be a tower made of weird, solid light, where she finds a horrible demon-thing that takes her shape. She senses its menace but still persists in her quest and demands a weapon that she can use against Guillaume, and the mirror devil tells her that what she seeks is in a temple on an island in a lake.

There’s more travel descriptions, and she encounters more horrible things as she goes, including a herd of blind horses that scream the names of women as gallop across the plains. It’s all extremely phantasmagoric, just top-notch weirdness in my opinion. Then, she finds a lake, and spots an island with a building on it in the distance. She crosses a strange bridge of solidified darkness and comes to the temple on the island in the lake.

So this is the titular Black God: a weird, sexless cyclops carved of unearthly stone, its alien lips pursed for a kiss. Oddly phallic too, a one-eyed monster and all. But it’s pretty fuckin’ weird for all that, huh!? A strange consciousness seems to live in the statue, and a horrible compulsion steals over her. Even the architecture of the little temple seems to draw her in, towards the smoochin’ statue.

There’s the scene that inspired the cover! It’s a strange one, for sure, Jirel kissing a weird statue; good weird image, huh?

Something is given to Jirel through the kiss, something terrible and alien and deadly. She flees, sickened and terrified, sensing that she is now bearing something horrible within her from the statue’s kiss. But eventually the panic subsides, and she smiles with grim satisfaction, knowing that she has her weapon.

She flees the twilight land, fearing instinctively the coming of its alien dawn. She also seems to know that there’s a ticking clock with this weapon, that she must pass it along to its target or it will destroy her. The fuse has been lit! She arrives back at the tunnel, slaughters more horrific little things, and then clambers through the weird passage, again experiencing weird dizziness and odd gravity as she travels between worlds. Eventually, she arrives back in the dungeon of her own castle, and what does she find there?

Weak with the strange evil inside her, she stumbles towards Guillaume.

As they kiss, Jirel feels her strength and peace of mind returning as she passes on the Black God’s Kiss. And, similarly, she witnesses the effect that it has on Guillaume.

The horror spreads over Guillaume – his body grows rigid and grey, he shudders and bleeds. He utters an inhuman and unholy cry of some alien emotion as the kiss destroys him. And then, a horrible realization comes over Jirel.

And that’s the End of the Story.

Now, right off the bat, we have to confront the kind of uncomfortable nature of this ending. Jirel, in fact, had been in love with Guillaume, had confused her passion for hatred, and in so doing had destroyed the man she actually loved. It’s not an easy thing to talk about, because of course Guillaume is not a good guy, what with the unwanted kiss and all, and a woman falling in love with her rapist is, of course, a pretty vile trope. But compare it to Moore’s debut story, “Shambleau,” where the female monster and Northwest Smith share a romance that is absolutely destructive. Love as a deadly and destructive force is obviously something that Moore had thought a great deal about and was a source of much inspiration for her, so I think we have to take it seriously in this story; she’s not simply recapitulating a sexist trope here, but rather trying to dissect and examine power and love and relationships, like she does for many of her stories.

I think there’s an important resonance here between this work and Moore’s sci-fi story that we talked about last week too. In “No Woman Born,” the central conflict of the story arises out of the inability of the men in Deirdre’s life to understand or even communicate effectively with her. A similar thing is happening here, I think. Jirel, a woman, a warrior, a ruler, is in a position of absolute power, one held through sheer force of her body and will. This position is upended at the very beginning of the story, Jirel put in a position of weakness and at the mercy of Guillaume, who has led his army to victory against the castle of Joiry and its ruler, Jirel. Neither of them are capable of dealing with the other as equals in this case; Guillaume treats her as mere spoils, which of course Jirel rejects. Both are violent warlords who live lives of violence – in later stories, it’s made clear that Jirel rules through strength, and that her men (all rough warriors themselves) follow her because she is a ruthless and powerful soldier. Trapped in these roles, they cannot see that they are very much alike.

And importantly, it is not sex that Jirel fears, a departure from a lot of fantasy (and fiction), where a woman’s virginity is a sacred thing. Jirel has fucked, she says as much to her priest. What she rejects is that she would be a mere plaything for a man, used and then disposed of. The conflict here is about power and dominance, and how these two people are undone by the structure of their society and their positions in a martial culture and time. You don’t want to get TOO biography-minded when pulling apart a story, but this theme of a strong woman coming into conflict with men and the world of men is such a prominent part of Moore’s writing that it would disingenuous not to say that there’s probably something very personal there, right? An obviously powerful and talented writer having to battle her way through a very sexist industry is something that Moore certainly experienced. Perhaps there’s a message in here about not letting your rage at assholes force you into doing something you regret later.

You might understandably find the ending rough, but you can’t deny that Jirel is a fantastic character, and the fact that she was written in ’34 at the HEIGHT of Conan-mania is really truly remarkable. A woman warrior that is not some weird virginal or sexless monster and who does not rely on magic or some cop-out bullshit is rare today, let alone back then. Jirel is a fuckin’ badass warrior, strong and tough and deadly all on her own because, presumably, she’s just good at killing things. That’s incredible! No wizard or magic chastity vow has given her her powers – she’s just Jirel of Joiry, warrior and warlord, and she will straight up kill your dumb ass if you get in her way. Moore wrote six stories about her, and while they’re all good, I think this is very much the best of the bunch. There’s just something really vital and exciting about the character, and she steps fully formed into the story right away.

And as weird fiction, I think this story delivers too. The scenes of the weird hell world that she travels to are really very strange and mysterious, and they make an interesting counterpoint to the Lovecraftian alien-gods that are more common (especially now) in both weird fic and its subgenre of sword and sorcery. I mean, there’s something very alien about the statue and, phallomorphism aside, I think it’s a very successful evocation of weirdness there, genderless and puckered up in the middle of a strange temple in a lake. Moore is really unparalleled at conveying a sense of oddness without recourse to the more cliched approaches you sometimes come across in Weird Tales. Similarly, her inventiveness and thematic approaches to her stories are just endlessly interesting to me.

I’ve had a really great time with this Moorevember stuff, and have really had fun rereading these absolute classics of hers. Farnsworth Wright was very much correct about putting her name up there with Blackwood and Lovecraft – she’s really one of the 20th century’s greatest genre writers, a true master of the art of the weird! But of course adventure calls, so we’ll have to leave C.L. Moore behind as we wade into some more yuletide sword-and-sorcery in the weeks ahead! See ya’ll next time!

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!”