The Stories of Francis Stevens-Sunfire

Finally I'm back to Weird Tales.

"Sunfire" was Francis Stevens' last published story. After its appearance as a two-part serial in Weird Tales (July-Sept. 1923), she fell silent. If "Serapion" was the climax of her career, "Sunfire" was a denouement, and, I'm sorry to say, not a very memorable one. It is a long short story or short novella and runs to sixty-one pages in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (an inaccurate subtitle by the way).

"Sunfire," originally entitled "Fire of Noon," is a straightforward narrative that reads like the plot of an adventure movie. As a tale of Lost Worlds, it hearkens back to Stevens' first story, "The Nightmare," from just six years before. In its description of a complicated physical environment--a pyramid-island in a high Amazonian lake or lagoon--"Sunfire" has similarities to "The Labyrinth" and The Citadel of Fear. Also like "The Nightmare," the nemesis is a cryptozoological creature, in this case a monstrous centipede. The powerful themes of her middle stories--love vs. hate, spirit vs. science, God vs. devil--are absent from "Sunfire," although she touches on the theme of altered states of consciousness. All in all, it's a lighthearted story of adventure and romance. Despite the blurb on the back cover of The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (did I mention that the subtitle is inaccurate?), the main characters survive. Those characters--five men on an expedition--banter and joust like Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry, and Captain Good from King Solomon's Mines (1885). I imagine Doc Savage's sidekicks were made from the same mold.

Gertrude Barrows (1883-1948) had come of age before movies as we know them were widely seen. She very likely would have learned storytelling from reading rather than from watching movies. And although pulp magazines were almost as old as she (1), that form had entered a new era after the war with the publication of specialty titles, The Thrill Book (1919), Black Mask (1920), then Weird Tales (1923). Although she wrote her stories in the pulp era, Stevens' style was still a little old-fashioned, even antiquated. In her last two stories, she alluded to characters past their prime at age forty; Gertrude turned forty in 1923, in the same month the last chapter of her last story was published.

No one knows why Gertrude Barrows Bennett stopped publishing stories. It could be that she did not feel equipped for a new era in pulps or in a larger society. (2) That's mere speculation. All we know is that Francis Stevens, who did not invent dark fantasy, wrote twelve stories published in a six-year period (plus one published when she was seventeen); that she may have been the first American woman to have a science fiction story published in an American magazine ("The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar," 1904); that she may have been the first American to create a totalitarian ruler as a character (The Heads of Cerberus, 1919) (3); that, with "Friend Island" (1918) at least, she was an early feminist writer of fantasy and science fiction; that she wrote several fine and memorable stories (The Citadel of Fear, The Heads of Cerberus, "Claimed!", and "Serapion" among them); that she was a very popular and widely admired writer (4); and that she may have been the most important woman writer of fantasy between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1759-1797) and C.L. Moore (1911-1987). Something else that comes out in a reading of her stories is that she may have been one of few Christian writers of fantasy and science fiction before C.S. Lewis.

There are some who believe that Francis Stevens influenced A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft. (5, 6) I haven't seen any evidence of that, but that's not to say that there isn't any. That belief seems to be just one of those things that people pass around on the Internet. But I'm done with my crusading. I think I have shown that Stevens did not invent or work in the late twentieth century sub-sub-genre of dark fantasy. That seems to be hype, or a marketing ploy, or the sound of someone trying to add something to his curriculum vitae. If there is going to be any further investigation into her career, someone else will have to do it.

And so ends this series.

Notes

(1) The first pulp magazine, The Argosy, switched to an all-story pulp format in 1896, in the year of Gertrude Barrows' golden age of twelve.

(2) Although Weird Tales dates from the specialized era of pulp magazines, it seems now like an old-fashioned or antiquated magazine. That makes sense in its way. After all, fantasy and weird fiction are about the past. The founder of the magazine, Jacob Clark Henneberger, was born in 1890, as was his leading author, H.P. Lovecraft. Both cut their teeth on tales by Poe, both came from the Victorian era, and both turned thirty in the year the Roaring Twenties began. For years the main cover artist was C.C. Senf (1873-1949), a decidedly Old-World artist with Old-World sensibilities. It would be many years before the fantasy or science fiction story was well polished--as in the work of Robert A. Heinlein, for instance--and before pulp art came into its own--as with Virgil Finlay or Ed Emshwiller. Those Victorian origins for Weird Tales are one of the reasons why I chose the background for this blog: it reminded me of that old velvety wallpaper you could still see in houses when I was a kid, long after Weird Tales had come to an end.

(3) She was not, however, the first American woman to write a dystopian novel. That honor probably falls to Anna Bowman Dodd (1855-1929), author of The Republic of the Future, published in 1887.

(4) Eight of her thirteen stories were cover stories at first publication.
(5) When I read her stories, I was reminded not of Merritt or Lovecraft, but C.L. Moore. I'm not sure how likely it is that Catherine would have read Gertrude's stories. I'm not sure that you could make a case that the latter influenced the former. More likely, they all read the same stuff and each other's stuff, and out of that soup came the fantasy of the 1910s through the 1940s.
(6) As I think about it more, Francis Stevens may have had more in common with Nictzin Dyalhis (1873?-1942) than with A. Merritt or H.P. Lovecraft: Both were pseudonymous authors about whom almost nothing is known; both lived, wrote, and died in isolation; both were writers of very colorful and imaginative science fantasy stories; both had a relatively small output of stories that were yet very popular; and both had more than their share of cover stories. Finally, speaking of isolation--from the Latin, "made into an island": five of her thirteen stories take place at least in part on islands. The remainder involve separation from the outside world, either physically or psychologically, perhaps a requirement for fantasy fiction in general.

I have been working on a series categorizing the covers of Weird Tales. I looked and looked at this one and couldn't figure it out. Now I have read "Sunfire" and I still can't figure it out. What the heck is going on here? And why did anyone think this would make a good cover? As the man in the commercial said, the world may never know. (Art by R.M Mally.)

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley