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Editor, Mary Gnaedinger
Fiction:
Earth’s Last Citadel • reprint novel by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner ∗
Death’s Secret • reprint novelette by John L. Schoolcraft ∗∗∗
The Soul Trap • reprint short story by Charles B. Stilson ∗∗∗
Lost—One Mylodon • reprint short story by Elmer Brown Mason ∗∗
Non-Fiction:
Cover • by Lawrence
Interior artwork • by Virgil Finlay (x6), Lawrence
What Do You Think? • editorial by Mary Gnaedinger & reader’s letters
Fantasy Book Reviews • by Sam Moskowitz
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Earth’s Last Citadel by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner is one of the finalists for this year’s 1944 Retro-Hugo Award in the novel category (although it appears in this 1950 publication, it was originally serialised in Argosy’s April to July 1943 issues). It starts off in the Tunisian desert with Alan Drake of US Intelligence trying to protect a distinguished Scottish scientist called Sir Colin Douglas from two Nazi agents. While they evade capture, Drake and Douglas come upon a shining sphere that appears to have risen out of the sand, an event that coincides with the two Nazis turning up (one of the two is Karen Martin, a spy with “the unstable brilliance of many mixed races shining in her eyes”—an unlikely hire, I think—and the other is Mike Smith, an American gangster of German origin). Before Drake and Sir Colin can be taken prisoner, this Central Casting quartet are compelled to enter the sphere, where they enter a deep sleep or stasis, and end up in the far future.
Drake is the first to wake up, with the vague memory of dreaming about an alien. He soon sees that, if there was an alien with them in the sphere, it has left. The others come round, and any burgeoning fight between the four is forestalled by what awaits them outside:
[This] was not the flame-scorched valley they had left. And it was not morning, or noon, or night. There was only a ruddy twilight here, and a flat, unfeatured landscape across which patches of mist drifted aimlessly as they watched, like clouds before a sluggish wind. Low down in the sky hung a dull and ruddy sun that they could look upon unblinded, with steady eyes.
Briefly, in the distance, something moved high up across the sky. There was a dark shape out there somewhere, a building monstrously silhouetted against the sun. But the mists closed in like curtains to veil it from his gaze, as if it were secret to this dead world, not for living eyes to look on. p. 18
Shortly after this they see and hear a winged human, and decide to go in the direction it was flying in an attempt to get food. During their journey they see another flier, which Smith (or perhaps that should be Schmidt) tries to shoot before Drake stops him. Later on a huge worm appears through the mist and slides past them. They eventually come to the previously seen building and note that it appears to be a fortress, albeit one which has a strange alien shape constructed from the same dark material as the sphere that brought them here. Drake has a premonition about something inside the fortress, and then something runs through the mist, which he catches. This turns out to be a young woman called Evaya:
The captive’s struggles had ceased when light came back around them. She hung motionless in Alan’s embrace, head thrown back, staring up at him. Not terror, but complete bewilderment, made her features a mask of surprise.
They were unbelievably delicate features. The very skull beneath must not be common bone, but some exquisite structure carved of ivory. Her face had the flawless, unearthly perfection of a flower. That was it—she had a flower’s delicacy, over-bred, painstakingly cultured and refined out of all kinship with the coarse human prototype. Even her hair seemed so fine that it floated upon the misty air, only settling now about her shoulders as her struggles ceased. The gossamer robe that had made her outlines waver so strangely in the fog fell in cobwebby folds which every breath fluttered. p. 24
At this point the pace picks up somewhat. Evaya takes them to Carcasilla, an underground city where they meet the others of her race as well as their ruler Flande (he is essentially a cross between the big taking head from Mork and Mindy, and the Wizard of Oz). He telepathically questions them until he gets bored, then summons a barbarian tribe called the Terasi to deal with them. Drake is knocked unconscious and separated from the other three during the fight, and Evaya later tends him at an “immortality” fountain in the centre of the city. Drake learns more about the history of the place.
Then, if the recent addition of the big talking head and the barbarians wasn’t enough to keep up the tempo, priestess Evaya receives a telepathic summons from the alien Light-Wearer, the only surviving member of the race that subjugated humanity millennia ago. When it arrives through the portal it engulfs Drake and tries to feed on his life force, but Sir Colin arrives and saves him with a gunshot. Drake is told later that the Light-Wearer cannot stand noise, and also that it is the alien from the sphere (there is no mention as to why it did it not feed on them while they were all together).
The rest of the story has a lot of running around that involves, largely, the Light Wearer and the Carcasillians trying to overwhelm the defences (large gongs) of the Terasi, who are sheltering the foursome. There is a bit more to the plot than that but you’ll have got the idea.
This is not a very good piece, and it has several failings. First, it takes ages to get going—they encounter Evaya a quarter of the way through the novel, and the writing up to that point is largely descriptive (this, the poor pacing, and the prose mark it out as Moore’s work). Second, the characters are cardboard cut-outs—I’ve already mentioned the Central Casting aspect above, but you can add to that a dreadful Scottish accent from Sir Colin and that Karen’s character is hardly used. Finally, the various ideas used in the story—predatory alien, immortality fountain, portals, remnants of humanity, etc.—are all just futuristic kitchen-sink nonsense, and hard to engage with.
I suspect that this was a fragment that Moore started and abandoned, and which Kuttner largely or entirely completed (compare the amount of description versus incident in the first quarter against that in the remainder, and you will see what I mean). Whatever, it is the worst thing of theirs I’ve read, and certainly not up to the quality of their other 1943 work. To that latter point—how on Earth did this become a Hugo finalist when Moore’s Judgement Night was overlooked? What on Earth were the Retro Hugo nominators thinking?
Death’s Secret by John L. Schoolcraft (All-Story Weekly, December 1st 1917) starts with an archaeologist called Williamson riding out to explore a desert oasis. On his arrival a strange noise spooks his horse so he looks around: he doesn’t find the source of the sound but he does find an unopened tomb. After he manages to dig his way into it, he finds a mummy in a casket—even though they are a thousand miles from the Nile—and a script that identifies the body as a young girl, and which also gives an account of how she was kidnapped and treated dreadfully by her captors. At the end of the script there is a curse which states that anyone who repeats the story will die within twenty-four hours.
At this point Williamson summons his boss Talcott, and the rest of the archaeological expedition. Initially Williamson hides the scroll from his boss, but on the way back tells him about it and later reads it to Talcott and another man called Purdy. The next day Williamson returns to the tomb to finish some work but does not come back. After Talcott and Purdy fruitlessly search for Williamson they find one of the natives with his watch, and are later led to his body.
After Talcott and Purdy bury the corpse they discuss the curse, and decide to set Williamson’s watch going again (it stopped when he fell from his horse) to see if he died within the twenty-four hour period. They find out he died three hours after leaving camp.
Most stories would stop at this point after suggesting that the curse is real, but this isn’t what happens here. This is just the start of a more complicated set of affairs which involve Talcott and Purdy going home by ship, and further deaths and mishaps. These include (spoiler) the ship hitting a derelict and Purdy going missing (after having told the story to a couple on board); Talcott consulting a psychic investigator and deciding to test the efficacy of the curse at his cottage; and an attack by a cat with poisoned claws, followed by another by its handler, one of many generations of tomb-guards.
Talcott sees off the cat and the handler (who Talcott discovers killed Williamson and Purdy), but the cottage collapses on him during a storm. The curse has finally claimed one of the three men.
This story is convoluted and a little far-fetched, but it’s a fairly good read for a 1917 work, I thought.
The Soul Trap by Charles B. Stilson (All-Story Weekly, March 10th 1917, as Liberty or Death?) has a doctor tending a dying man called Theon Karker, who uses what little strength is left in him to implore the doctor to go up into the attic of the house and break a Crystal cabinet. The doctor does not pay too much attention to this but, after Karker dies, finds a letter addressed to him. He reads of Karker’s researches into spiritualism, and his inability to communicate with the spirits as they all too quickly move to another plane:
[The] soul passed beyond, like that newly come to this world, is weak and inexperienced in its state and must develop and progress, as a child’s mind unfolds. And when the soul does gain in strength and expression, it straightway uses its new-found powers to pass on into another realm, whence no mediumistic summons may recall it.
Then, on an accursed day, I reasoned, if all these things be true, and a man find some way to cage a spirit and confine it, he might find it to progress and grow under his hand, in a hot-house as it were, and control it to his purpose. Familiarity with the sciences of the laboratory led me to ponder this problem to a conclusion. Spirits, I argued, must have some material qualities; else how can they produce audible phenomena, how rap on walls, play musical instruments, move articles of furniture? If so, if the soul is capable of such manifestations—and I had experienced them often—it must be in the nature of an ethereal fluid or essence; and such may be confined. p. 99-100
Karker then gives an account of how he incarcerated a dying man in a glass cage to trap his departing spirit and later communicate with it. This proved successful, but after a period of this the spirit made dire threats, and Karker had an accident and paralysed himself before he could release it.
The remainder of the story builds atmosphere as the doctor waits on the porch for dawn before he goes up stairs to investigate. When he does so he sees a glass cage in the gloom, and he hurriedly goes back downstairs and outside to wait until there is more daylight. Later he goes back up . . . .
The final part (spoiler) reveals that there is no body in the glass cage and that the whole story was in Karker’s mind. Or as the story puts it:
Pennerton stepped to the side of the couch. He looked down at the dead man and his face grew solemn with pity. Slowly he said:
“Ah, the poor tortured spirit was not there, not in the crystal chamber, my friend. It was here”, and he laid his hand on Theron Karker’s cold forehead. p. 104
This ending will no doubt prove irritating to some as it completely subverts reader expectation and the supernatural premise of the story, but I thought it an atmospheric and quite well done piece (and uttered a “Ha!” on finishing it). I’ll be interested to see what is said about this one in forthcoming letters columns.
Lost—One Mylodon by Elmer Brown Mason (All-Story Weekly, April 1st 1916) is a sprawling story about two explorers who travel to Patagonia to investigate a cave where they hope to obtain the bones of a long dead creature called a mylodon. When they get there (via a night in a South American town and a journey by yacht—I did say it was sprawling) they descend into the cave where they dig up little more than human bones. When they go deeper into the cave, one of them slips down a slope, and finds a pile of interesting remains. When the other goes to get a rope to help his colleague back up the slope he is taken hostage by a group of natives. While they rebury their ancestors’ remains, he manages to free himself, simultaneous with his colleague appearing covered in phosphorescent mud. The natives flee, bar one woman who is hit by falling rock and is kept as a hostage by the pair.
The rest of the story involves them trailing down the coast after her to a place where they find still-living examples of the mylodons:
“Wheet-wheet, wheet-wheet,” came a tiny voice from the tree tops, and I looked up straight into a face peering down at me. And what a face! The round, yellow, foolish eyes were set well up in the narrow, greenish forehead; two flat, sniffing nostrils expanded and closed above a thicklipped, vacuous mouth, from which protruded a long, slender, blue tongue, like a piece of satin ribbon. Never have I seen anything that portrayed such complete imbecility as that face!
“The utter damned fool!” I heard myself say aloud.
“Wheet-wheet,” came the ridiculously tiny voice, the underbrush parted, and an immense bulk moved out into the open.
If you could have forgotten the idiot face (which you couldn’t), I suppose the mere size of the animal would have made it impressive. It was as big as an elephant, as an elephant sitting on its haunches. The hind legs were enormous, doubled under it, and ending in great, flat paws; the back was curved, nearly humped; the forelegs were short, powerful, and armed with stupendous claws; the neck was long, a cord dangling from it, and topped by that fool head, maddeningly out of proportion to the bulk of the rest of the animal; while the entire body was covered with short, very green fur. p. 117
Later (spoiler) our two geniuses decide that it will be a good idea to take flash photographs of the creatures in their cave, at which point they stampede and the only remaining male is killed.
This is a readable enough story, but you will need to overlook the fact it is a rambling and ultimately dispiriting story about two theriocidal idiots.
The Cover is an average effort by Lawrence, who also contributes one of the interior illustrations. The rest of the interior artwork is by Virgil Finlay, which includes some good work (the title pages for the Moore/Kuttner and Schoolcraft) and some that may be a variation on other work (the dark fortress from the Moore/Kuttner). Some of it just does not reproduce that well (the woman from the Schoolcraft is too dark, as is the Lawrence illustration for the Mason).
What Do You Think? opens with a short note from editor Mary Gnaedinger about a couple of recent items, and she also plugs a couple of upcoming stories (the third of Charles B Stilson’s ‘Polaris’ trilogy, and The Son of the Red God by Paul L. Anderson—the latter story did not appear before the magazine folded a year later). Gnaedinger ends with this:
I believe you will agree with me that the letters in this issue reflect a great enthusiasm for our magazine, and that they show even more than heretofore a profound interest in the selected stories, and a heart-warming and comfortable companionship among the readers in their relationship to each other.
Sincerely yours in Fantasy,
Mary Gnaedinger. p. 6
This editorial content is followed by a huge amount of reader’s correspondence (around forty letters): there is comment about A. Merrit’s Fantasy, a new companion magazine to this title and Famous Fantastic Mysteries (the fourth of this new magazine’s eventual five issues was on the newsstand the same time as this issue of Fantastic Novels Magazine); announcements of various conventions and clubs; a number of letters from British readers (this includes anecdotes about difficulties with UK exchange controls—sending money out of the country—and mention of the new British edition of the magazine).
As for comments on the stories, Max Brand’s The Receding Brow, and Charles B. Stilson’s Minos of Sardanes (the second of the ‘Polaris’ trilogy) are the two that receive the most positive mentions.
Negative comment comes from Marion McNunn Nelson from Caspar, Wyoming, (one of the few thoughtful letters in the issue):
I can’t resist writing you once again after just finishing the letter section of the March issue of Fantastic Novels. I always read the letter section first and always enjoy it, and always have a great many comments, backtalk and enthusiastic agreements swarming through my mind when I finish; and always feel I, too, simply must sit down at my typewriter and have my say. But fortunately for you—for I’m sure you must always get much too many letters—I usually subside again without writing.
While I have enjoyed some stories better than others, I feel you have never really let me down. I am amused at the tone of weighty and Olympic wisdom with which some of your younger readers criticize this and that yarn. And at the widely varying definitions of “fantasy” made. Fantasy is, to me, an all inclusive word—the supernatural, the practically impossible adventure, horror, science-fiction (the interplanetary part of which I easily get fed up on—in fact, the only kind of science fiction I care for really is that on the order of Taine or Stapledon, etc.)
Of all the stories you’ve published the only two I really didn’t like are the Chesterton’s “Thursday” novel, I’ve even forgotten the exact name—“The Man Who Was Thursday”, I guess [Famous Fantastic Mysteries, March 1944]. And your last, “The Flying Legion” [by George Allan England in the January 1950 issue]. Exciting, sure. But Chesterton was very subtly putting over a great piece of illusionary, reactionary propaganda; and England’s story, too, seemed to express much too much of personal and propagandaish bias. I am neither an anarchist nor a Moslem, but both those stories left me disgusted, with a bad taste in my mouth. I was surprised and disappointed with the England story. (Chesterton I knew of old.) Because one man is bored with life, having everything in a material way anyone could want, he is perfectly willing to sacrifice any number of lives of innocent people in a wild, cruel adventure.
The whole story is an affront to a great and brave people—even though they may have their cruelties, too. And I think anyone who has read Lawrence of Arabia’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, as I have, would feel the same way. I hate any stories today that make villains out of a whole people. p. 126
Fantasy Book Reviews by Sam Moskowitz is an interesting column, given his habit of contextualising the books covered. There is this on Theodore Sturgeon’s collection Without Sorcery, for instance:
Unlike Ray Bradbury, who has written the introduction to this volume and who is one of the brightest literary stars on the fantasy horizon, Sturgeon does not present even a hint of the repetition in theme, style and ideas, which duplication presents Bradbury’s chief weakness. Because of this, there is no need to urge moderation in the sampling of Sturgeon’s wares. With the lone exception of Butyl and the Breather, which is a sequel to The Ether Breather, it would be hard to believe that any two stories in the volume came from the pen of one author. p. 105
And this on Ralph Milne Farley’s Myles Cabot on Venus:
If you fancy yourself as an ultra-sophisticate who must find social significance in the web of the stories and cannot tolerate lines that are not clipped in the Hemingway fashion, this tale of Myles Cabot, who is transported to the planet Venus without preparation or travail; who battles against and then with the giant ants of Venus to attain the hand of Lilia, fair princess of that planet, will prove utterly insufferable to you. But those who retain enough of their youth to remember the magic of roaming the ancient plains of Mars with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous character, John Carter, will also relish this story.
Old-time readers of Argosy and early issue followers of F.F.M. will he pleased to see this famous old-time scientific romance gain the sanctity of hard covers at last. p. 106
Elsewhere there are a couple of interesting snippets. In his review of The Lungfish, the Dodo and the Unicorn by Willy Ley, he states that “Ley leans to the conclusion that some day a sea animal, hitherto unknown and larger than any whale, may be discovered.” In the comments on Stanley G. Weinbaum’s book Martian Odyssey and Others, Moskowitz notes that Time magazine used the book as an excuse for a “full page write-up on science fiction”.
A middling issue, with the Moore and Kuttner novel a particular disappointment. ●
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