Happy Halloween, 2022!

Terence E. Hanley, 2022.

Robert A. Madle (1920-2022)

Writer, Editor, Publisher, Essayist, Book Reviewer, Bookseller, Collector, Fan
Born June 2, 1920, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died October 8, 2022, Rockville, Maryland

Robert A. Madle has died. For those not familiar with him, he was a science fiction fan, an essayist on and reviewer of science fiction, a writer of letters to science fiction and fantasy magazines, and a writer, editor, and publisher of science fiction. He did all of these things and more, everything that a fan of science fiction could do and might dream of doing. He was the last surviving member of First Fandom, an organization of fans of science fiction active before January 1938. In fact, the late Mr. Madle originated the idea of First Fandom in October 1958 while visiting with some fellow fans in Bellefontaine, Ohio. First Fandom was formed at Midwestcon, in Cincinnati, on Easter weekend 1959 with he himself serving as first president.

Robert Albert Madle was born on June 2, 1920, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He enjoyed reading what he called "boy's books," and there a lifetime of collecting began. He discovered science fiction in the Tom Swift series of books, read Edgar Rice Burroughs, and was "a great Buck Rogers fan." With fellow fan John V. Baltadonis (1921-1998), he discovered pulp science fiction in the form of two issues of Wonder Stories found in a Philadelphia junk shop in 1931. He wrote his first published letter in a science fiction magazine in the August 1935 issue of Amazing Stories. Although Mr. Madle never had a story in Weird Tales, he is tied for eleventh place for most letters to appear in "The Eyrie," the letters column of the magazine. He had seventeen. Baltadonis is tied for tenth place with nineteen. From March 1936 to February 1937, Mr. Madle, then still a teenager, had a remarkable string of letters in ten straight issues of "The Unique Magazine."

Mr. Madle attended Northeast High School in Philadelphia. He served in the U.S. Army as a truck driver and teletype operator, also in public relations, from July 1942 to January 1946. He continued work with the U.S. government after the war, in the Department of the Navy and the Department of the Army. He also worked in the private sector. According to his obituary in Locus, Mr. Madle conducted psychological research in human/machine interfaces. He received his bachelor's degree from Drexel Institute, now Drexel University, in 1951. He followed that up with an MBA in 1953, also at Drexel. The Madle family lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, for many years and he remained active in science fiction fandom there. In 1943, Robert Madle married Billie Franklin Lindsay (1919-1997). They had four children together. After her death, Robert Madle married Ana Lisseth Martinez. She preceded him in death as well. He is survived by his four children, as well as a stepdaughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Robert A. Madle died on October 8, 2022, at home in Rockville, Maryland, where he lived in retirement with his family and with a vast collection of science fiction and fantasy magazines, books, and memorabilia. He was 102 years old. Although I can't say that he was the last living contributor to the original Weird Tales, he was certainly among the last, especially to the Weird Tales of the 1930s. Imagine: he read when the magazine was new in print and right off of the newsstand. He read when stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, and so many others were new to the world.

Robert A. Madle's Letters to "The Eyrie"

• "Edmond Hamilton's Stories" (Dec. 1935)
• "Brief Briefs" (Feb. 1936)
• "Pointed Paragraphs" (Apr. 1936)
• "No Age Limit" (May 1936)
• "An Astounding Issue" (June 1936)
• "Doctor Satan Getting Better" (July 1936)
• "An Ace Issue" (Aug.-Sept. 1936)
• "Another De Grandin Tale" (Oct. 1936)
• "Our Early Yarns" (Nov. 1936)
• "Concise Comments" (Dec. 1936)
• "More Jules de Grandin Yarns" (Jan. 1937)
• "The Theatre Upstairs" (Feb. 1937)
• "Fate Weaves a Web" (Apr. 1937)
• "The March Cover" (May 1937)
• "Concise Comments" (July 1937)
• "Finlay Frontispiece" (Mar. 1938)
• "Magnificently Composed" (May 1939) 

Further Reading

• The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom by Sam Moskowitz (The Atlanta Science Fiction Organization Press, 1954).
• All Our Yesterdays by Harry Warner, Jr. (Advent:Publishers, Inc., 1969)
• "A Personal Sense of Wonder" by Robert A. Madle:

• Part One from Mimosa 27 at this URL: http://jophan.org/mimosa/m27/madle.htm
• Part Two from Mimosa 30 at this URL: http://jophan.org/mimosa/m30/madle.htm

• "Bob Madle" at Fancyclopedia 3, here.
• "Bob Madle Turns 100 Today" by Mike Glyer at Mike Glyer's News of SF Fandom, June 2, 2020, here.
• "Bob Madle, 1920-2022" by Mike Glyer at Mike Glyer's News of SF Fandom, October 11, 2022, here.
• "Robert Albert Madle, Writer" at Prabook, here. (Not updated as of October 21, 2022.)
• "Obituary, Robert 'Bob' Madle, June 2, 1920-October 8, 2022" at the website Dignity Memorial, here.

Robert A. Madle (1920-2022).
From The Immortal Storm by Sam Moskowitz (p. 59).

Thanks to my correspondent. Thanks also to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for sources and links.
Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Husbands & Wives-Part One

As I was reading Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee (2018, 2019), I had the idea of writing about husband-and-wife creative teams. Then I read After Utopia by Mack Reynolds, and after that about Reynolds, his wife, and their families. I decided that my idea could make a short series on this blog. So, first, I'll write about Mack Reynolds and his wife, then about some other husbands and wives.

After Utopia by Mack Reynolds (Ace, 1977) has some autobiographical content. For one, the protagonist, Tracy Cogswell, is about the same age as the author when he was presumably writing his book. Cogswell is also a socialist, an agent or operator or activist on the leftward end of the political spectrum. Reynolds' novel is set not in the 1970s when it was published but sometime earlier, in the 1950s, I think, so that Cogswell is old enough to have been a soldier in the Spanish Civil War and an operative during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Cogswell is from Cross Plains, Indiana. We learn as much on page 91 of the Ace edition. I'm a Hoosier and so my ears prick up whenever I hear the name of my native state. I've been to Cross Plains, too. It's a small place in southeastern Indiana. A long time ago I worked in the forestland around there. Those were two happy years in my life. They happened before a great loss and real sadness set in. You probably know of another Cross Plains, the town where Robert E. Howard lived. That one is in Texas.

On page 92, Cogswell mentions a man named Lon Wooley who raised champion-sized shorthorn cattle on his farm in Cross Plains. I had never heard of Lon Wooley, so I looked him up. He was real. So were his cows. His old farm is on County Road 900 South, east of town. As it turns out, Lon Wooley was also the father-in-law of Mack Reynolds. I'm not sure I have ever read a novel of any kind in which the author inserted the name of a family member into his or her fiction.

Lon Wooley was Alonzo Warren Wooley, Sr. Born in 1875, he lived nearly a century, dying in 1967. His wife was Jennie (Alberding) Wooley, who was born in 1884 and died in 1953. They had several children. The one at hand was Helen Jeanette Wooley Reynolds, wife of Mack Reynolds. She was born on August 23, 1919, either in Cross Plains or in Friendship, Indiana. Muzzle-loading rifle enthusiasts know about Friendship. They hold a meet there twice a year.

Helen Wooley went by the name Jeanette Wooley. (I wonder if that was in honor of Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress.) Jeanette Wooley's father got his name in a science fiction novel. She got hers in a bigger book called Hearings Regarding Communist Activities in the Cincinnati, Ohio, Area, Sat., July 15, 1950, U.S. House of Representatives (p. 2784). According to a witness named Marjorie Elaine Steinbacher, Jeanette Wooley attended meetings of communists in the Cincinnati area, presumably in the first half of 1947. "What her work was," Marjorie said, "I don't know. She left quite soon because she had to go to Kentucky. She was having some kind of serious operation performed." You can read Miss Steinbacher's testimony in the original. You might also look at an article called "Nearly 30 Are Called Reds" in the Cincinnati Enquirer, July 16, 1950, page 28.

Jeanette Wooley's father raised cattle. Her mother was involved in other activities, and maybe that's where Jeanette came by her interest in communism. In 1920, Jeanette lived in Cross Plains with her family, all together as families do. But in 1930, she was far away, at a place called New Llano Cooperative Colony in Lousiana, with her siblings and her mother, who worked as a kindergarten matron. Alonzo was meanwhile back home with his son, Alonzo, Jr. The New Llano colony was actually a utopian commune founded in California by Job Harriman (1861-1925), a member of the Socialist Labor Party and a vice-presidential candidate on the ticket with Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) when he ran for president in 1900. The colony was in operation in Louisiana from 1917 to 1937. It failed, of course, as communes do. By the time that happened, Jeanette Wooley was on the verge of adulthood. By the way, Harriman and Debs were also Hoosiers. And Mack Reynolds was later a member of the Socialist Labor Party. He had his own Indiana connections, separate from his wife, as we'll see.

Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) married Evelyn Marie Sandell (1918-1987) on October 14, 1937, apparently in New Hampshire. By March 1939, Jeannette Wooley was married, too, to a man named Smith. By July 1943, she was Jeannette Wooley again. I don't know where or how she and Mack Reynolds met. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he worked as a national organizer for the Socialist Labor Party. At about that time, he gave talks in the Cincinnati area. Maybe that's where they met. But Reynolds was a rambling man. Maybe they had met a decade before in that Arkansas commune or some similar place where socialists flock. In any case, Mack Reynolds and Jeannette Wooley were married on September 15, 1947, in Cincinnati. They participated in that very bourgeois institution of marriage for the rest of their lives.

In 1949, the Reynolds moved to Taos, New Mexico, where Mack Reynolds met fellow writers Fredric Brown (1906-1972) and Walter James Sheldon, known as Walt Sheldon (1917-1996). Brown (also from Cincinnati and also with an Indiana connection) is supposed to have persuaded Reynolds to switch from writing detective stories to science fiction. In the Federal census of 1950, Mack and Jeanette Reynolds were enumerated in Arroyo Seco in Taos County. Jeanette worked as a soda fountain manager. He was of course a writer. His first published science fiction story was "Isolationist" in Fantastic Adventures, June 1950.

In 1953, the Reynolds moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. They moved away, then back again in 1965. Reynolds wrote and published for the rest of his entirely too brief life. He died on January 30, 1983, at age sixty-five. His widow died in November 1992 at just seventy-three years old. Both are buried in San Miguel de Allende, at a cemetery called Panteón de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, in the Gringo Section, Graves 703 and 704. That's a Catholic cemetery by the way, a nice place for two materialists to come to rest.

Mack Reynolds was the son of Verne La Rue Reynolds (1884-1959) and Pauline (McCord) Reynolds (1889-1991). (Reynolds' full name was Dallas McCord Reynolds, hence the "Mack." Both he and his wife went by their middle names.) Verne L. Reynolds' parents were Isaac Quincy Reynolds (1853-1890) and Phoebe Etta (Hawkins) Reynolds Reynolds (1856-1937). Both were Hoosiers, and so in having his fictional counterpart born in Indiana, Mack Reynolds was simply returning to the land of his grandparents. By the way, Phoebe Reynolds married Isaac Reynolds' brother John first. He died in 1877. She and Isaac tied the knot in 1879, but he died, too, in 1890. She married again in 1892, her last husband being Albert Frost (1841-1907), a Civil War veteran of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. I wouldn't rule out that he was related to May Eliza Frost, better know to readers of Weird Tales as Eli Colter (1890-1984). One more by-the-way: Phoebe Etta Hawkins was a missionary for the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Africa.

Now one last thing: Hoosiers remember Eugene V. Debs as one of the many famous people from our state. I can't say that I'm proud of him, but at least there's this: In 1919, Debs went to prison for exercising his right to speak freely, a natural and unalienable right bestowed upon us by our Creator and affirmed by and in the Constitution. President Woodrow Wilson didn't like that, though, and so, essentially, he became Debs' jailer. I guess that means that Wilson's party and belief system--progressivism--have been imprisoning and trying to silence their opponents for at least the past century. They're still at it today. Debs' sentence was commuted, by the way, by a Republican and a conservative.

Further Reading

"Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds as Forteans" by Joshua Blu Buhs on his blog From an Oblique Angle, April 14, 2017, here.

I don't know whether Jeanette Reynolds ever cowrote anything with her husband, but he must have bounced ideas off of her and had her read his manuscripts: a wife (or husband) is often the writer's closest critic. In any case, they seem to have shared beliefs and ideas. He put her father into one of his novels. Maybe he drew on her life in a commune to write another: Commune 2000 A.D. (1974), cover artist unknown.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

After Utopia by Mack Reynolds

Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) was a very prolific author of science fiction novels and short stories published between 1950 and 1983. He was something of a red-diaper baby and though he went by a kind of tough-guy moniker and lived an active life, he was a socialist. (1) That may have changed in 1958 when he resigned from the Socialist Labor Party in America. I know very little about that whole matter, but his transgression seems to have been, essentially, success. As Ambrose Bierce observed, success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows. Socialism, being about envy, despises it.

As I was reading late last year or early this year about Utopia and Dystopia, I learned that Mack Reynolds wrote utopian fiction. "I have to read those stories," I thought. Soon after, I found his book After Utopia (Ace Books, 1977) at a local secondhand store. As the saying goes, ask and you shall receive. I read After Utopia this spring and drew more than a little from it.

Reynolds was well aware of the conventions of the utopian novel and he observed those conventions in his own book. First, the author of stories of this type must get his hero quickly, even precipitously, into Utopia. The author mustn't bother very much with a setup when telling about his ideal society is really the object. By this convention, maybe the John Carter novels are actually utopian. After just twelve pages, Carter, lickety-split, wakes up on Mars, having flown there by a kind of astral projection. In "The Sapphire Goddess" by Nictzin Dyalhis (Weird Tales, Feb. 1934), the narrator simply wills himself into a new world--Click!--after just four very brief introductory paragraphs.

Sometimes the hero must sleep his way into Utopia, and that's what happens in After Utopia. Other examples of Sleeping into Utopia (or Dystopia) include:

• Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888)
• When the Sleeper Wakes, also known as The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells (1899)
• Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan (Amazing Stories, Aug. 1928), which became the comic strip Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. by Dick Calkins (1929)
• Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science Fiction, April & May 1942; 1948), in which a side character from the twentieth century awakens in the future
• "The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth (Galaxy Science Fiction, Apr. 1951)
• Sleeper, a film by Woody Allen (1973)
• Idiocracy, an absolutely essential film by Mike Judge and Etan Cohen (2006)

There are without a doubt other examples. They show that in order to reach into the dream of Utopia, a man must first sleep. (1)

In utopian and dystopian fiction, there is very often no action and no plot. Or words and ideas become the plot and the action. Utopia/Dystopia is the goal and the intellectual playground for what Eric Hoffer categorized as the man of words or man of ideas. Words and ideas are the excitement of such a man. To him, they are the action, including in any utopian story. (How often in our world is the revolutionary--the man who seeks to overthrow everything--essentially logorrheic? Karl Marx is a perfect example. Adolf Hitler is another.) In After Utopia, there is very little action. Most of what there is, is initiated by the man of the twentieth century awake in the twenty-first. Otherwise, it is mostly talk and more talk.

In the utopian story, the protagonist has to learn the culture of Utopia, including its language, and there is usually a sped-up process for teaching it. Very often the teacher is female. Sola in A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912) fills that role. There is a female teacher--a Moon woman--in The "Lomokome" Papers by Herman Wouk (1968). The teacher in After Utopia, named Betty, is also female. I should add that the teacher in Dystopia is also often female, but she leads the hero away from or out of Dystopia instead of into it. And she uses love, sex, and human feeling to teach him and not anything out of a book.

When it isn't satirical or ironic, Utopia is a liberal or progressive genre. The dream and purpose of this creed seems very often to be sexual freedom, license, libertinism, or hedonism. Alternatively, liberalism, despite any higher or finer goals it might have, eventually reduces itself to being about sex and sexual matters, or in our time, what people call gender. Much of human society, culture, religion, and government seems to be about controlling sex (which I think is made so powerful in part so as to defy human ambitions towards godhood). The Liberal or Progressive chafes under traditional controls and wants to do away with them. But supposed conservatives sometimes do, too. Edgar Rice Burroughs is an example of that, I think. He is supposed to have been an atheist or agnostic. Beyond that, despite his very Victorian squeamishness and sentimentality, he inserted (no pun intended) sex into his books, including in the overt nudity of John Carter and the people of Mars. (3) It seems to me that Burroughs yearned for a kind of freedom in writing his Mars novels. That freedom included bodily freedom, unclothed of the constraints of his life and times. One of the things that attracted me when I was young about Frank Frazetta's illustrations of Burroughs' Mars novels is their sexuality and extraordinary vigor. Frazetta saw what Burroughs had put into his stories but was unable to depict fully given the times in which he wrote. Frazetta was free from those things. We should remember that he did his best work during the 1960s and '70s, in other words the Golden Age of Heterosexuality. As I've written before, I think that Frazetta's vision was superior to Burroughs'. I would rather go adventuring on Frazetta's Barsoom than on Burroughs' version of that Red Planet. In any case, After Utopia by Mack Reynolds is as much a sex fantasy as it is a Utopia, but then Utopia is very often just an excuse or a way to escape from constraints and into license. Call it Utopia as a letter printed in Penthouse Forum.

After Utopia is built on the model of Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. That much is clear. As I have pointed out, the protagonists in both sleep their way into the dream of Utopia. The problem in Reynolds' novel is that his future Utopia is not a desirable kind of place. His hero, Tracy Cogswell (a man), keeps asking his hosts, why is he here? Why have they brought him from the past into the year 2045? And they keep putting him off. Finally he gets his answer. "The human race is turning to mush," they say. And they need his help.

"For more than half a century [Academician Stein tells him] we've had what every Utopian throughout history has dreamed of. Democracy in its most ultimate form. Abundance for all. The end of strife between nations, races, and, for all practical purposes, between individuals. And, as a species, we're heading for dissolution." [Emphasis added.] (pp. 54-55)

Setting aside the idea that history can end and that we can have stasis, dissolution would seem the logical endpoint of Utopia. That or a new revolution, or, as Stein (not Goldstein, as in 1984) puts it: "To overthrow the present socioeconomic system and form a new society." (p. 55) Utopia/Dystopia resists revolution of course. That is part of its nature and its strategy for survival. In his conceit, the utopian theorizer believes that there can be no further revolution after his own is accomplished.

Cogswell's three hosts have sent for him--have brought him from the past into the present--because he, as a man of the twentieth century, is still a man. He has the qualities that are lacking among men of the twenty-first by which a society--even a society of weak, stupid, shallow, and dissolute people--can be overthrown. The film Idiocracy has more than a little in common with After Utopia, but I'm also reminded of the movie Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), in which, again, people from the past have the strength and the grit to do the things that need doing in this still perilous future. We could easily say the same thing about our own time in which there is so much stupidity, weakness, and incompetence--especially in government--enough of those things and more to get us all killed if we're not careful. People of today are not up to the task. What we need are people of yesterday. (4)

Mack Reynolds was good at scientific extrapolations, better than almost any science fiction author I know of from that time and probably just as good as Robert Heinlein. In After Utopia, there is addictive programmed dreaming, equivalent to our virtual reality, computer gaming, Internet porn, and so-called Metaverse. There are also print-on-demand books. Late in his book, Reynolds described a gem of an extrapolation, what he called a transceiver, what we would recognize as a smartphone: a combination communications device, a device for accessing libraries of information, an "identification device," and a tracker or GPS unit (p. 176) Reynolds also predicted the current idea (around on the Internet since 2016) that "you will own nothing and you will be happy," for his people of the future own nothing and are happy that way. Whether they are happy in general is another story.

Anyway, eventually, towards the very, very end of the book, Tracy Cogswell, the man with a woman's name (one of his hosts, named Jo, is also a man, or "man"), figures out how to help his hosts and overthrow their society, and finally, finally, he takes action. And it works. It's not very convincing, but it's also an idea not without precedent in science fiction and in the ideas of real-world people. It's a surprise ending, so I won't give it away. I will say, though, that the ending is similar in a way to that of Things to Come, another story of a future Utopia.

Notes

(1) In our time, socialism is not a manly or vigorous pursuit. The most prominent socialists in America today are a superannuated hippie layabout and his callow sidekick, a dingbat ex-bartender from the Bronx. Their followers are stupid and weak in the extreme, the women harridans and the men feminized or infantilized beyond reach. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin are probably turning over in their graves, or on his bier, I guess, if you're talking about Lenin.

(2) There is no doubt a relationship between waking up or awakening and being woke. Wokeness was originally a black take on the old and very human idea of waking up--of opening one's eyes--to what's really going on in one's life or in the world. A non-genre novel with that idea in its very title is Hanger Stout, Awake! by Jack Matthews (1967).

(3) The Lady in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra (1943) is also naked, but her nakedness is innocent: like Adam and Eve, she is clothed in innocence. The people of Burroughs' Mars may live before the apple, but I don't sense that innocence in them. Instead, they seem to be just another expression of Burroughs' fantasy of freedom or what you might call a conservative Utopia.

(4) As I was watching last night (Saturday, October 15, 2022), I realized: there is at least one area of our culture--and our educational system--in which there is still excellence, and that is in college football.

After Utopia by Mack Reynolds, cover art by Vincent Di Fate.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

C.S. Lewis on Science Fiction

On Tuesday, September 27, 2022, I made an entry called "Fantasy Against the Machine." I began with this sentence:

If you're looking for an example of the antipathy that fantasy might have towards science fiction, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (1945) would be a place to start.

I base that on ideas and themes from Lewis' Space Trilogy, especially That Hideous Strength, but also Perelandra (1943) and this passage:

He [Weston] was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of "scientifiction," in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God's quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite--the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species--a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. (Chapter 6)

Perelandra is the second book in the trilogy and my favorite. The first is Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The silent planet of the title is Earth. It's called that because Earth, its people being "bent," is under quarantine so that we may not spread our fallen condition among the stars.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis pretty well skewered H.G. Wells by casting him as a comical character and a stooge for the plans and schemes of some truly rotten people, the kind of people who actually exist in real life and are now at the heads of government and industry throughout the Western world. (You could say that the communists in China are a pretty mild threat compared to them.) Lewis set all of this up despite his note at the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet:

Note: Certain slighting references to earlier stories of this type which will be found in the following pages have been put there for purely dramatic purposes. The author would be sorry if any reader supposed he was too stupid to have enjoyed Mr. H.G. Wells's fantasies or too ungrateful to acknowledge his debt to them.

In any case, I have a feeling that Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy, in part, as a response to a distinctly Wellsian brand of science fiction, perhaps especially to ideas expressed in the film Things to Come (1936), which ends, of course, with a scene in which the people of Earth, in all of our pride and ambition and grand plans, attempt to break out of what Lewis called "God's quarantine."

Some people consider the Space Trilogy to be works of science fiction. I'm not so sure of that. I like a tighter definition of the term. I might call it instead space fantasy or science fantasy. In some ways, it has more in common with weird fiction than it does with science fiction. The resurrection of Merlin in That Hideous Strength is an example of a weird-fictional versus a science-fictional event. Over all, there is an emphasis on the spiritual and supernatural rather than on the material and scientific. It's worth noting that Lewis subtitled this last book in his trilogy "A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups."

On September 29, 2022, reader Carrington Dixon left a comment on my entry "Fantasy Against the Machine":

I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that Lewis "had some antipathy towards science fiction," just because he makes Wells one of the villains of That Hideous Strength. After all, several of Lewis' works are generally considered to be science fiction. To get a better understanding of how Lewis regarded science fiction you might read his essay, "On Science Fiction." I have it in the book Of Other Worlds; it may be available in other collections. I should say that generally he liked sf; although, he liked some kinds more than others.

Lewis admitted in his introductory note that he enjoyed Wells' fantasies and owed them a debt. I imagine that he read other fantasies--i.e., stories of science fiction--and enjoyed them, too. And so I read his essay "On Science Fiction," as Mr. Dixon recommended, and I find that Lewis did indeed read and enjoy some science fiction, but he seems to have included that genre (or those genres) in a wider category of all kinds of fantasy fiction. He also broke science fiction down into several types, what he called "sub-species," and examined them one by one. It's all really interesting but entirely too short. I wish that Lewis had brought his wide reading and erudition to bear and had written at length on the topic. But we have what we have from him instead and will have to be satisfied with that. In any case, it's clear that Lewis liked some of his sub-species and did not like others. I would like to thank Carrington Dixon for his comment and his recommendation.

So, I guess what I should have written is that C.S. Lewis seems to have had some antipathy towards the science-fictional idea of progress, also to a hard-scientific or materialist approach to the subject matter of science fiction. But then he was skeptical of the real-world idea of progress anyway, perhaps more accurately, antipathetic towards the efforts of the progressives and materialists among us. Maybe what he was looking for more than anything in his reading is a moral, spiritual, or human dimension in fantasy and science fiction.

In his essay, Lewis wrote: "Far the best of the American magazines bears the significant title Fantasy and Science Fiction." Presumably he was referring to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which began seventy-three years ago this month under the editorship of Anthony Boucher (a fellow Christian) and J. Francis McComas. (The occasion was the 100-year anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe.) In regards to that magazine and the kinds of stories it published, Lewis wrote:

In it (as also in many other publications of the same type) you will find not only stories about space-travel but stories about gods, ghosts, ghouls, demons, fairies, monsters, etc. This gives us our due. The last sub-species of science fiction represents simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time. It is not difficult to see why those who wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply have increasingly been driven to other planets or other stars. It is the result of increasing geographical knowledge. The less known the real world is, the more plausibly your marvels can be located near at hand. As the area of knowledge spreads, you need to go further afield: like a man moving his house further and further out into the country as the new building estates catch him up. [. . .]

     In this kind of story the pseudo-scientific apparatus is to be taken simply as a 'machine' in the sense which that word bore for the Neo-Classical critics. The most superficial appearance of plausibility--the merest sop to our critical intellect--will do. I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best. I took a hero once to Mars in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus. [These things happened of course in his Space Trilogy.] Nor need the strange worlds, when we get there, be at all strictly tied to scientific probabilities. It is their wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matter. When I myself put canals on Mars I believe I already knew that better telescopes had dissipated that old optical delusion. The point was that they were part of the Martian myth as it already existed in the common mind.

It seems clear to me that Lewis was writing here about what we would call the Lost Worlds type of story and its extensions (which go into outer space), perhaps more broadly science fantasy and not strictly science fiction. And he mentioned H. Rider Haggard in his discussion (though not in the parts I have quoted above). Significantly, in beginning this part of "On Science Fiction," Lewis wrote: "I turn at last to that sub-species in which alone I myself am greatly interested." And I will emphasize the line:

I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best.

* * *

By the way, in his discussion of what he called the Eschatological sub-species of science fiction--for example Wells' Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End--Lewis used the F-word. He wrote:

Stories of this kind may explain the hardly disguised political rancor which I thought I detected in one article on science fiction. The insinuation was that those who read or wrote it were probably Fascists.

And:

The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or future, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.

So that flinging around of the word and charge of "Fascist!" and "Fascism!" is old, old. I should add that it usually comes from people who supposedly look to the future, not the past, and want new things, if there can indeed be anything new under the sun. Maybe that's why some people read and write science fiction: to get out from under the sun, to go beyond the sun into new things.

* * *

Thanks again to Carrington Dixon for reading and writing, also for his recommendation. Thanks also to everyone who reads and finds interest in this blog. I hope to continue it for a long time to come, and I hope you will stay with me as I go.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

An Anonymous Comment on LRH

I'm still playing catchup on comments left on this blog. I have two more to go.

First is a comment on Joseph A. Winter, onetime associate of L. Ron Hubbard and John W. Campbell, Jr., in their development of Dianetics in 1949-1950. Sometime during 1950, Winter and Hubbard had a falling out. Winter died suddenly four years later of a coronary thrombosis. He was just forty-four years old.

On Saturday, May 28, 2022, I published an entry called "Joseph A. Winter (1911-1955)-Part One." I completed my series on Winter and his sister, Margaret Winter Kearney Campbell (1907-1979), several days later, on June 5, 2022. Winter's sister, better known as Peg Campbell, was the second wife of John W. Campbell, Jr., and the one who was with him to the end.

On Sunday, June 19, 2022 (Father's Day), Anonymous left this comment on my entry on Dr. Winter:

Readers should remember that Joe Winter was related through marriage to John W Campell's wife, Joe's sister. They all socialised with the Hubbard group and Street & Smith and the Saint Elizabeth's Hospital staffers in the heady days of the Bay Head Group, HDRF and the Elizabeth Foundation. Hubbard later said that he had to distance himself from almost all of those people due to the alleged dubious communist party loose associations. Maybe Winter and the others did get the wrong end of the stick. They were not aware (I think) of Hubbard's proven intelligence officer connections under Ian MacBean and Joseph Thompson since 1927 China. I personally think Ledora-May Waterbury de Wolfe or her Husband Harry Ross Hubbard were more than just casual civilians in that respect. Hubbard had a good home education before George Washington and later Princeton University schools. I wonder just why Joseph Winter parted ways so suddenly with LRH. The CIA connection had not been establish in public at that time. Only after 1985 were the CIA connections proven. It all centred around using psychological methods to achieve workable solutions for the US and UK players. Hubbard had to keep his silence on his role for all his life. Only in the taped lectures would he offer thin anecdotal evidence. What if Winter reincarnated and remembered a lot?

There's a lot of information in that comment, some of it probably arcane to the non-Scientologists among us. For your information and mine, I'll write about some of it.

• Joseph A. Winter, M.D. (1911-1955) was a physician, originally from Michigan but who moved to New Jersey in January 1950 in order to assist Hubbard and Campbell in their "research" into Dianetics. A newspaper article on his move was the first mention in print that I have found of "Dianetics" as a noun specifically in reference to Hubbard's brainchild. As I have mentioned, Winter's sister, nicknamed Peg, was the soon-to-be wife of Campbell. Presumably, Dr. Winter introduced them sometime in 1949 or 1950.

• Street & Smith were the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction, edited by Campbell.

• St. Elizabeth Hospital presumably refers to a hospital in Elizabeth, New Jersey, now called Trinitas Regional Medical Center (or possibly a hospital in Manhattan), but there is another St. Elizabeth Hospital that figures in the history of Dianetics/Scientology. That one is a place where Hubbard is supposed to have studied psychiatry.

• The Bay Head Group were the earliest developers of Dianetics, including not only Hubbard, Campbell, and Winter, but also electrical engineer Don Rogers and publisher Arthur Ceppos. The group was based in Bay Head, New Jersey, where Hubbard made his temporary home. (Most of his homes appear to have been temporary.)

• The HDRF was the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, incorporated in April 1950. Its members were Hubbard, Campbell, Winter, Rogers, Ceppos, lawyer C. Parker Morgan, and Hubbard's second wife, Sara Northrup Hubbard, you know, the one who didn't exist.

• Ian MacBean was Ian Gordon Macbean or MacBean, presumably a British military man born on February 24, 1892, and who died on June 29, 1944. To say that Hubbard had "proven intelligence officer connections" is to repeat, I think, a bit of fancy dreamed up by Hubbard and his followers in Scientology. In 1927, Hubbard was sixteen years old and on a trip with his mother to visit China. Can we even imagine him making "intelligence officer connections" on such a trip?

• Joseph Thompson was Joseph Cheesman Thompson (1874-1943), a wacky kind of character who served in the U.S. Navy, spied on Japan, studied herpetology, and bred Burmese cats, among other things. He is supposed to have known Hubbard, dating from early 1923 when Hubbard was eleven years old. Thompson was also a psychoanalyst and studied the insane at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D.C. Thompson had his own ideas about the mind, insanity, mental illness, and psychological trauma. One of his nicknames was "Crazy Thompson," and at least one of his fellow psychoanalysts considered him mentally ill or insane. In 1929, while in Hawaii, he was relieved of duty with the Navy and went into retirement. Whether or not Hubbard was actually one of his associates, he appears to have fit the mold. After all, Hubbard, too, served in the Navy--without any distinction I should add--and was almost certainly mentally ill, if not insane at one time or another in his life. And like Thompson, Hubbard was influenced by the works and ideas of Sigmund Freud.

• Ledora-May Waterbury de Wolfe (1885-1959) and Harry Ross Hubbard (1886-1975) were L. Ron Hubbard's parents. According to public records, her name was actually Ledora May Waterbury. The DeWolf part comes from her mother, Ida Corinna DeWolf Waterbury (1863-1944). L. Ron Hubbard's son, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (1934-1991), changed his name to Ronald DeWolf. Known as "Nibs" or "Ron," DeWolf cowrote the book L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman? (1987) with Bent Corydon.

As for everything that comes after in the comment above made by Anonymous, those are his or her thoughts and opinions, seemingly informed by Scientology. Joseph A. Winter may have explained or implied his reasons for breaking with Hubbard in his book A Doctor's Report on Dianetics: Theory and Therapy (1950), but I don't have a copy of that book, so I can't say. I also can't say whether Winter was ever reincarnated.

Anyway, I would like to thank Anonymous for writing. His or her comment has led me to learn a little more about Hubbard, Dianetics, and Scientology.

Further Reading

• Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee (2018, 2019).
• "The Spy Who Never Was? L. Ron Hubbard and 'Maj. Ian Macbean of the British Secret Service'" by Chris Owen on the website The Underground Bunker, July 29, 2022, here.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The comment left by Anonymous is his or her own original work and should be considered his or her intellectual property and so protected under copyright. I have reproduced it here for informational purposes.

Recent Losses

A correspondent has let me know about two recent losses in the worlds of science and science fiction:

Radio astronomer Frank Drake died on September 2, 2022. He was ninety-two years old. Born on May 28, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, Dr. Drake studied at Cornell University and Harvard University. From 1958 to 1963, he worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia. In 1960, he began Project Ozma, a search for extraterrestrial intelligence by way of radio waves. Frank Drake followed Otto Struve (1897-1963) and was followed by Carl Sagan (1934-1996) in a line of scientists who have speculated on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and who carried out a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI. Science fiction author James E. Gunn (1923-2020) fictionalized their efforts to some degree in The Listeners (1968-1972, 1985).

Horace Chandler Davis, known as Chan Davis, died on September 24, 2022, at age ninety-six. Dr. Davis was born on August 12, 1926, in Ithaca, New York. He received his doctorate at Harvard University and taught mathematics at the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto. Science fiction fans know him better as an author of a-dozen-plus-one short stories that appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, Planet Stories, Star Science Fiction, and other titles from 1946 to 1994. His first was "The Nightmare," published in Astounding Science Fiction in May 1946. That credit surely made him one of the last living authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, calculated to have run from 1938 to 1950. Dr. Davis' widow is the historian Natalie Zemon Davis.

We send condolences to the families of both men.

An early example of the destruction of the Statue of Liberty in science fiction, William Timmins' cover for Astounding Science Fiction, May 1946, illustrating Chan Davis' story "The Nightmare." I was going to make a catalog of such images but someone has done it before me and has done it well. Look for Joachim Boaz's blog Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations: Reviews of Vintage Science Fiction (1945-1985) and an entry called "Adventures in Science Fiction Cover Art: The Statue of Liberty on Pre-1968 Magazine and Novel Covers" from October 1, 2012, here.

Thanks to my correspondent.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Allison V. Harding in Tellers of Weird Tales

If you click on the label on the right, you will see all of the articles I have written on this blog about Allison V. Harding. There are more items to add to the resulting catalog. These will help to bring things up to date and to help fill in some gaps.

In late 2010, I was reading Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies, a hardbound anthology edited by Marvin Kaye, when I came upon a story called "The Damp Man." It was my first encounter with Allison V. Harding. I enjoyed the story. It reminds me of movies from the 1940s. In his very brief introduction to "The Damp Man," the late Mr. Kaye set forth the mystery of Allison V. Harding: she was actually Jean Milligan, an attorney in 1940s New York. I like to solve mysteries. If you turn that around, you could say that unsolved mysteries are troubling, not just to me but maybe to all of us. Witness the current fascination not only with true crime but also with the real or supposed mysteries of history. Conspiracy theories are attempts to solve mysteries, I guess, even where no mystery exists.

For months I thought about the mysterious case of Allison V. Harding. I began this blog in part--a large part in fact--so that I might solve that mystery. My first entry, dated April 22, 2011, was on C.L. Moore. How else could I begin? But my second was on Allison V. Harding. That was on April 26, 2011. I listed the thirty-six stories in the Harding oeuvre in that first article. I naïvely thought that someone out there in this wide world might know something about her and the woman behind the Harding stories. I didn't think that a secret like this one could be so closely guarded. And yet it was. In fact, there may have been just one person in this same wide world who knew the true identity of Allison V. Harding, and he was living, I believe, as a recluse in his New York City apartment.

By the way, the first Harding story in Weird Tales is called "The Unfriendly World" (July 1943). Regardless of its subject matter, I think the title of the story to be fitting, considering what I subsequently found out about Allison V. Harding.

I asked for help in my first entry on Harding. No help came. So I kept going and I solved the mystery: Jean Milligan (1919-2004) was the wife of Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015), the associate editor of Weird Tales magazine during most of the time during which the Harding stories were published. I wrote about my investigations in "Who Was Allison V. Harding?" on May 24, 2011.

On May 26, 2011, I published an entry on Lamont Buchanan. I think everything I wrote then is still valid. The next day, May 27, 2011, I published an article and list called "Lamont Buchanan's Books."  I found a review that stated he had published thirteen books. I found only twelve.

On February 8, 2014, I wrote about John Giunta (1920-1970) and his role as the cover artist for the last Damp Man story, "The Damp Man Again" (Weird Tales, May 1949).

On September 15, 2015, I wrote an entry called "Take the Z-Train," accompanied by a cartoon by Charles Addams. That was the first time that I wrote about my idea of Lamont Buchanan as the actual author of the Harding stories, this based on my reading of the stories themselves and on the circumstances under which they were published. I didn't then and still don't have any evidence that he was the actual author. I would like to think that there is some kind of extant evidence--or proof--one way or another, but I'm not very hopeful of that. I should remind everyone that the sole bit of evidence that Jean Milligan was the author of the Harding stories is Sam Moskowitz's account of seeing her name as the payee in the original files of Weird Tales, which are, of course, no longer in existence.

When I wrote on September 15, 2015, I didn't know that Lamont Buchanan had died. That unhappy event took place on April 21, 2015, almost exactly halfway between his birthday and that of his departed wife. According to the website Find A Grave, his place of death was Connecticut. He was ninety-six years old.

The next day, September 16, 2015, I wrote "Wounds," about Lamont Buchanan but also about parallel events in the life of my own family. (My aunt and uncle lived reclusive lives. Both fell at home within a few weeks of each other and went first to the same hospital, then to the same nursing home. She died before he did.)

On September 17, 2015, I wrote "The Origins of the Damp Man." In that article, I made a comparison between the loathsome and creepy stalker of the story title and the psychopathic killer in I Wake Up Screaming (1941), one of the first film noire movies. (Remember that part where I compared "The Damp Man" to movies of the 1940s?) I also found another case of a frozen ghost (nineteenth-century ghosts gave way to twentieth-century monsters of one kind or another) in "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall" by John Kendrick Bangs (1891). I think this was the first time I suggested that the Harding stories may have been influenced by--or maybe derivative of--others that had come before them.

On September 18, 2015, came "Allison V. Harding-Revelations and Requests," a brief entry in which I asked people to read the Harding stories and respond with their own ideas about possible inspirations and antecedents for them.

My next entry was, in contrast, a long one. It's called "J.D. Salinger and Lamont Buchanan." The date was September 19, 2015. In it, I wrote about the extraordinary possibility that Buchanan was a model for Holden Caulfield, hero of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951). It was Shirley (Baker) Ardman (ca. 1922-2014), a student at Columbia University in 1940, who made that claim. She was introduced to Salinger by Buchanan so that she might interview him. Shirley told her story to Noel Young, who wrote about it in an article called "Top Tips for Writers from J.D. Salinger--Advice from Beyond the Grave," dated January 26, 2012, and posted on the website The Drum. Unfortunately, the link I provided is no longer live.

I asked many questions in my article of September 19, 2015. One was facetious: Was Allison V. Harding actually J.D. Salinger slumming among the pulps? On September 24, 2015, in "The Undead Past," I cleared that up--I hope--by stating that I don't think Harding was Salinger, but I also asked whether any scholar was up to the task of uncovering further connections between Salinger and Buchanan. I think the answer is the same now as it was then: probably not.

On October 1, 2017, the New York Daily-News published a full-page article called "You Ask Me Rye?" by James Fanelli, regarding the $15.4-million estate of Lamont Buchanan and its possible disposition. (These punning titles have to stop.) It's probably the best and most thorough account of Buchanan's life and situation that I have found, especially his later life. It includes quotes from his last living blood relatives and relatives by marriage, nieces and nephews all. It also includes a photograph of Lamont Buchanan, the first that I have ever seen. I feel certain there are--or were--others, but who knows what has happened to the Buchanans' personal property? Who knows what might be--or might have been--in their possession when they died? Could there have been a solution to the strange and mysterious case of Allison V. Harding? Maybe. Maybe not. The article is about money (Buchanan's) and fame (Salinger's) and not very much about writing or literature. If writing and literature had been the main thing, we would probably have never heard about it. Everything would have gone in the Dumpster, and maybe that's where it all went anyway.

On April 26, 2021, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of this blog, I wrote "A Season of Discovery and Beginning," about C.L. Moore, Allison V. Harding, and other people and things. The spring-season months of March, April, and May seem to have been central in the lives of Lamont Buchanan and Jean Milligan.

Most recently, I wrote "The Strange Case of Allison V. Harding" (Sept. 29, 2022) and "Allison V. Harding: Further Possibilities" (Oct. 1, 2022). Those two entries bring us to today. Other people have written about Allison V. Harding, Lamont Buchanan, and Jean Milligan in the time since I discovered her identity. They include Scott Nicolay, Anya Martin, Mike Barrett, Douglas Anderson, Cora Buhlert, and the seemingly anonymous author behind the website Paperback Warrior.

Since I first wrote, there has been at least one published collection of the Harding stories. I was supposed to write an introduction to another, but that is a project that has gone by the wayside, as so many have these past seven years since the troubles began in my family. Or maybe I should say that troubles that already existed began bubbling up again in that time. I know something now about troubles that exist in families and the lives of family members. I think I understand something about the strange case of Lamont Buchanan, who is, I believe, really at the heart of the Allison V. Harding story. I wish that all of these things could have been otherwise. I wish that maybe only a couple could have been otherwise, but as the Bible verse says, "Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward."

Charles Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015). This photograph was published in the New York Daily News but without attribution. Presumably it was provided to the newspaper by someone else, perhaps an attorney, caretaker, associate, or family member. In republishing it here, I do not make any claims to a copyright to it and express my wish not to infringe on anyone else's copyright. I trust and hope that my use of it here falls under the doctrine of fair use. My use is strictly for informational and educational purposes, as I do not profit materially from writing this blog.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Takings and Turnings

Some object to the supposition that Allison V. Harding was not a woman but a man, believing--rightly I should add--that the things that are women's should remain women's and not be taken from them. Yet every day in America, the things that are women's are being taken from them, most importantly the integrity of their bodies and of their sex, also their uniquely female experiences and identities. The things and places that are or should be women's are being taken from them, too. Women are now not always the victors in women's sports. Some sports records are held not by women but by men. Women and girls are no longer safe in women's restrooms, dressing rooms, changing rooms, shower rooms, and locker rooms. Men have entered women's prisons and women's shelters and have assaulted them there, sexually and otherwise. The takers in all of this are men, but they are being helped in many cases by women. Others who object are forced to remain silent, all that is, but the most powerful among them. Even then, these powerful women are vilified, and there are attempts to strip them of their power, to strip them even of their own creations. If we're looking for a case in which there are real attempts at silencing and erasing a woman writer and to take from her the things that she has created, look no further than that of J.K. Rowling. Men are doing that and women are helping them.

I have written before about the desire afoot in this world to destroy the past and everything that remains of the past. There is that negative goal to be sure, but I have overlooked the possibility that there could be a positive goal to replace it. The desire to destroy is a powerful one, but what comes after the destruction? The skilled destroyers among us can only wake up empty once they have done their work--either that or cast about for fresh, new things to destroy. The replacers, though, still have their goals and may pursue them through and past all of the destruction.

We have given up on God, and so there can be no spiritual transcendence. The yearning for transcendence remains, though, and so we replace spiritual transcendence with other kinds of attempted transitions, transferences, and transmutations. Ordinarily, we seek spiritual transcendence of the body and of our earthly experience because God and a purely spiritual existence lie on the other side. The replacers among us have decided that we are Gods--each one of us, capital-"G" Gods. We have usurped his role, believing we have his wisdom and authority, are confident that we can exert his power. We believe we can remake his world and his universe, of which we are a part. We believe we can remake ourselves in our own image. Whatever we can envision--whatever we might want of ourselves--we can become. We have become Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

Weird fiction has its limitations. For one, it tends to be told in the form of a tale: One time this weird thing happened when somehow I stepped outside the normal world and normal experience, but then I came back, or: I witnessed this weird thing that came into our universe but then went away again, but we should be on the lookout for that ever happening again. The weird tale--tale being the operative word--tends to be a premodern form. Science fiction, on the other hand, tends to more sophisticated and modernistic. And it takes place in the real, material world. It isn't weird. It's real and normal, logical and rational. Weird fiction is also a prewar genre. Once the world was awakened from a sometimes irrational past into a scientific and technological present of atomic bombs and rocketships, of the possibilities of apocalypse and dystopia, of alienation and all of the psychopathology of modern living, weird fiction lost much of its power. Science fiction became the alternative. Before the war there were monster movies. After the war, Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein. Meanwhile, science fiction came into the movies, and we had The War of the Worlds, This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There were weird-fictional monsters after the war--vampires and zombies for example--but these were often given scientific explanations, such as in The Last Man on Earth, Night of the Living Dead, and The Omega Man. Other weird tales were turned into types of horror, including body-horror (An American Werewolf in London) and the horror of the psychopathic killer, who was depicted as a supernatural or almost supernatural phenomenon, even if psychopathy is seen in our time as a scientific, medical, psychological, or sociological (i.e., a "soft"-scientific) problem. There were exceptions of course. I'm working here in generalizations.

Before the war there were serious authors who wrote weird fiction--their tales tended to be called "ghost stories"--but before the war there doesn't seem to have been any great discontinuity between serious literature and genre literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and still others wrote in those genres. Some authors of the American South before and after operated in what is called the "Southern Gothic" mode. After the war, though, serious literature turned away from weird fiction and ghost stories and towards science fiction. Again, there were exceptions. Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, and Joyce Carol Oates have worked in Gothic modes. But when turning to genre fiction for their subjects and themes, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Walker Percy, and others like them have chosen science fiction rather than weird fiction as their preferred mode. Put another way, science fiction is fiction, a higher and more literary form, versus weird fiction as a folk form, simpler form, or more popular form. Again, there are exceptions, H.P. Lovecraft being a notable example.

Still working in generalizations.

My point here is that we are living in and will continue to live in a science-fictional world and a science-fictional society. The real-world problems and threats confronting us are science-fictional, not weird-fictional: We have done away with the supernatural--or think we have done away with it--and have turned entirely towards the material and the scientific--or at least what we call the scientific. We face threats in the form of apocalypse and dystopia, but for now at least, the greater threats, I think, are our development of artificial intelligence, our turning towards robots and away from human beings, and perhaps greatest of all, our seeking to transcend ourselves as we were created towards something we believe we ourselves can create--or re-create. Again, we believe that we and the universe in which we find ourselves are flawed. And we believe ourselves capable--wise enough and powerful enough--to remake all of it. These attempts to correct our perceived flaws, to remake ourselves, to transcend ourselves, to remake the entire world and all of human nature--the belief that we can do these things--can be seen as a kind of gnosticism, if I understand the term and the concept correctly.

There are new gnostics--new progressives and new utopians--among us. Two of them were born in the 1930s--the last decade, by the way, in which weird fiction may still have stood above science fiction in popularity. These men, both from central Europe--a place of origin for so many twentieth-century horrors--don't have long for this earth. We can't rejoice that they will die, nor should we. That's not the point. The point is that they and everyone like them will die, and all of the grand ideas filling their heads will die with them. That's the fate of all of us, now and until the end of time. There is no escaping it. Our physical bodies are mortal. That's how we were made. We cannot transcend them, at least on our own and under our own power. We certainly can't transmute them. We cannot be anything other than what we are. It is essential that we all remember these things and hold them in our thoughts every day. 

The science-fictional idea is that we will progress into the future. The weird-fictional alternative might be that we are bound to ourselves and the world as we and it were created in a supernatural beginning and which continue to operate under supernatural auspices. We may try to escape those bounds, but our destiny or fate is either to return or to face the dire consequences of our transgressions. How many transgressive weird-fictional heroes and protagonists are punished or suffer these consequences in the end? Dr. Frankenstein is certainly one of them and may have been the first. His example is still with us. We should heed it.

Victor (an ironic name) Frankenstein tried to create a man where there was never before a man. Medical doctors today are trying to make men where there were never men and women where there were never women. Technologists would like to create beings out of machinery and souls where there were never before souls. These are things that simply can't be done. Women can never have the things that are men's. Beyond that, after their attempted transitions, they will never again have a chance at the things that are women's. They might as well try to get with child a mandrake root. But all women should remember that men in attempted transition may very well continue to have the things that are men's and take from women the things that are women's. Women in attempted transition give things up; men in attempted transition become takers. Remember that.

Trans- . . . that prefix . . . The word weird has to do with fate or destiny, but it also has to do with turning or becoming. To transgress, to transition, to transmute, to become transhuman, to pursue transference, to transcend--all are a kind of turning or becoming. But what things can we do strictly on our own, and what others will forever lie beyond our power? Transgression--our first sin--is a choice placed before us. Transcendence--offered to us so that we might live--is the alternative. All of these other things can only lead to earthly and bodily horrors.

And then maybe we will have a return to weird fiction.

In this cover for Mandrake the Magician, magic meets science--and wins!--but only by resorting to good old-fashioned fisticuffs. Note the Frankenstein-village setting of the Gothic romance juxtaposed with the flying saucers of science fiction. The monsters of science fiction have taken the place of those of weird fiction. Note, too, that the aliens and their ship (like a cupola) are entirely green.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Allison V. Harding: Further Possibilities

I have thought that stories by Allison V. Harding published in Weird Tales were actually the work of Lamont Buchanan, associate editor of the magazine, writing under a pseudonym. That's based on my reading of the Harding stories--at least some of them--as the work of a man rather than of a woman. According to Sam Moskowitz in his examination of the original Weird Tales files, Allison V. Harding was the pseudonym of Jean Milligan. That's based on the assumption that because payment for the stories was sent to Jean Milligan, she was their author. A third possibility is that Buchanan and his future wife collaborated on the stories. Now I have a fourth possibility, that Jean Milligan was acting as a literary agent or representative for Lamont Buchanan. I don't have any evidence to back that up. It's only a supposition.

I'm not sure that anyone knows when, where, or how Lamont Buchanan and Jean Milligan met. They are supposed to have known each other in New Canaan, Connecticut, where Jean Milligan went to high school. (A newspaper article from 2017 calls them "high school sweethearts.") Both were born in 1919. Both would seemingly have graduated from high school in the same year, 1937, though Jean Milligan, having been born on May 31, may have been in the class of 1938. Lamont Buchanan was older than she by almost three months (he was born on March 6) and would have celebrated his eighteenth birthday during the 1936-1937 school year, when he would presumably have been a senior.

I have found a city directory for 1938 for Stamford, Connecticut. Here is a transcription of the original entries for all of the Buchanans listed in that directory:

Buchanan Charles L Mrs h Weed n Wahackme rd

--Claire F wid Paul 137 South ave

--Lamont student r off Weed n Wahackme rd

I take that to mean that Lamont Buchanan, son of Mrs. Charles L. Buchanan, was a student with a rear office (?) either on Weed Street (a north-south street) or Wahackme Road (an east-west road), which intersects Weed Street just to the northwest of New Canaan. At the time, the Milligan family was living on Richmond Hill Road, which is less than a mile to the south, also an intersecting road with Weed Street. Unfortunately, Jean Milligan was not listed with her parents. Perhaps she was still in high school in 1938. Or maybe she was away at college.

Jean Milligan's mother, Beatrice Isabel (Humphrey) Milligan, died on November 10, 1938, at age fifty-three. On May 19, 1939, Jean returned to New York from a trip overseas, most recently (or maybe it was her only destination) from Bermuda. She was nineteen years old. There are so many things now that we will never know. But did Jean travel away from the place of her recent loss?

On May 12, 1940, Jean Milligan was enumerated in the Federal census with her father, John R. Milligan, at 81 Richmond Hill Road in Fairfield County. She was twenty and working as a secretary. Unfortunately, I can't read the next piece of information, the industry in which she worked. You can try to turn it into "Law office" if you want, but I don't think that's what it says. It looks more like "Tell office," perhaps signifying a teller's office. She was in her third year of college. The Darien, Connecticut, city directory for 1940 also has an entry for her at 81 Richmond Hill Road. It even has her mother's name and death date. Jean then was a student. I suspect the directory was published before the census was made, in which case Jean Milligan may have been in college until late 1939 or early 1940, when she began working as a secretary. This is assuming she didn't work and attend classes at the same time. 

Meanwhile, Lamont Buchanan was living with his mother, Anne Buchanan, at 227 57th Street in Manhattan. They were enumerated there on April 3, 1940. Like Jean Milligan, he was in his third year of college. It's interesting to see that several artists and at least one magazine editor, Paul R. Milton of The Dance Magazine of Stage and Screen, were also in residence at 227. In other words, there were connections to art and the magazine industry, also to advertising and related fields, in Buchanan's own building. We should remember that Buchanan's father, Charles L. Buchanan, was also a writer.

On October 16, 1940, Lamont Buchanan registered for the draft. He was living at the same address as before, but now we find out that he was a student at Columbia University. His father was then living at 853 7th Avenue, New York, New York. At five feet, eleven inches tall and only 135 pounds, Lamont Buchanan must have been rail thin. And by the way, he had brown hair, brown eyes, and a light complexion.

There were developments at Weird Tales magazine in 1940, too. Farnsworth Wright was last credited as editor in the issue of March 1940. In the next issue, May 1940, Dorothy McIlwraith assumed the helm. Her associate was Harry Aveline Perkins, another of a cohort born in 1919. His birthday was April 22. According to Douglas A. Anderson on his blog, Lesser-Known Writers, Perkins remained as associate editor of Weird Tales until September 1942. Curiously, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) does not have entries either for Harry Aveline Perkins or for Lamont Buchanan. ISFDb does however have an entry for Jean Milligan as Allison V. Harding. Lamont Buchanan became associate editor of Weird Tales with the November issue of 1942. Seven months later, in July 1943, the first Harding story, "The Unfriendly World," appeared. Thirty-five more followed. The last was "Scope," in January 1951.

By 1942 when Buchanan started with Weird Tales, the magazine was already on a bimonthly schedule. Only three issues intervened between his arrival on staff and the publication of the first Harding story. It's probably safe to assume that the lineup for at least a couple of issues was already set by the time Buchanan started. If that's the case, then a story by Allison V. Harding appeared in one of the very first issues available to her. A curious coincidence. Can we say that Buchanan actually guided that story into print? Can we say also that he may have been biased in doing so? If so, what was the source of his bias? Did he act in favor of a woman whom he had presumably known for several years but who was not known to have been a writer or editor under her own name, then or ever? Or was it in his own favor, Buchanan the current associate editor and current or future published writer?

So Jean Milligan attended college. Whether she graduated or not, I can't say. She worked as a secretary. Her father, John R. Milligan, was an investment counselor in his own firm, Van Cleef, Jordan, & Wood, with offices at 14 Wall Street in Manhattan. He was in a position to employ her in his own office or to secure employment for her in another. Sam Moskowitz said or assumed that Jean Milligan was an attorney in New York during the 1940s. She received payments for the Harding stories at a law firm. But, again, just because she received payments doesn't mean she was the author, and just because she received them at an attorney's office doesn't mean she was an attorney. I think it safer to assume that she was the author of the Harding stories than that she was an attorney, but what if she was receiving payment on behalf of someone else? What if she was acting as a kind of literary agent for an obviously pseudonymous author?

More assumptions. More unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions.

According to Douglas Anderson, Lamont Buchanan remained with Weird Tales until September 1949. Allison V. Harding had just three more stories in the magazine after that, "The Underbody" in November 1949, "Take the Z Train" in March 1950, and, possibly an outlier, "Scope" in January 1951. Presumably, "The Underbody" was already lined up for publication when Buchanan left. "Take the Z Train" may also have been. "Scope" came more than a year later, though. That's why I have called it a possible outlier.

By 1950-1951, Buchanan was already a published author of books. His books from 1947-1948, before he left the employ of Weird Tales, were:

• The Story of Football in Text and Pictures (New York: Stephen-Paul, 1947)
• The Story of Basketball in Text and Pictures (New York: Stephen-Paul, 1948)
• People and Politics: The Pictorial History of the American Two-Party System (New York: Stephen-Paul, 1948)

His books from 1951, the same year in which the last Harding story was published, were:

• The Story of Tennis in Text and Pictures (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951)
• A Pictorial History of the Confederacy (New York: Crown Publishers, 1951)
• The World Series and Highlights of Baseball (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1951)

So, by 1950, when the enumerator of the Federal census came around again to his apartment (on May 25), Lamont Buchanan was a published author of books. There were three of them already. More were on the way. And yet he gave his occupation in the census as a freelance writer for magazines. Which magazines though? Was Weird Tales one of them?

Still more unanswered questions.

Now here's a reproduction of the only newspaper article I have found on Buchanan's writing career:

In case you can't read it, the pertinent part says:

Lamont Buchanan, making capital of his background as a ghost-writer for political windbags, and a concocter of "think pieces" for the oversized picture magazines, has produced an amazing pot-pourri combining the illusory profundity of the former with the graphic illustrative quality of the latter.

The source is a review of Buchanan's book People and Politics, written by Richard N. Boulton and published in the Hartford Courant Magazine, May 29, 1949. So in addition to being a magazine editor and author of books, Lamont Buchanan was a ghostwriter and a magazine writer. Another way of saying "ghostwriter" is to say that Buchanan wrote things for which other people took credit or were given credit.

This chronology continues . . .

Unfortunately, I haven't found Jean Milligan in the 1950 census.* But there was, finally, a direct link established in 1952 between her and Lamont Buchanan: they were married that year, presumably in Manhattan. Lamont Buchanan had his last known book, Ships of Steam, published in 1956. After that, he went silent, at least under his own name. But could he have continued in his anonymous or pseudonymous writing or in his ghostwriting? If he did, it couldn't have been for Weird Tales, which had come to an end in September 1954.

Lamont Buchanan wrote and edited under his own name. He also wrote--apparently anonymously--for "oversized picture magazines." And he was a ghostwriter. These things are known and sourced. On the other hand, we know almost nothing about Jean Milligan--except that she received checks for the Allison V. Harding stories. Until there is more evidence uncovered, this is, I think, where the mysterious case of Allison V. Harding stands.

* * *

By the way, there was another writer associated with Van Cleef, Jordan, & Ward. Her name was Edith Louise Hough (1915-1981) and she was the author of Sicily: The Fabulous Island, published in 1949. The website Find A Grave says that "for many years she was a secretary at the investment firm of Van Cleef, Jordan, Ward & Davidge in Washington, DC." On Thursday, May 30, 1957, she shot and killed Zurab Abdusheli in her apartment in Washington, D.C., after he had become "psychologically aggressive." Ms. Hough shot him several times before putting a final bullet into his head. "I couldn't stand to see him suffering," she said. The last shot, she said, was "to put him out of his misery." I wonder if she considered that all of his misery could have been avoided if she hadn't fired any shots at all, but then Edith Hough was a paranoid schizophrenic. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and institutionalized, but only for a while. It's a famous case in the annals of psychiatry, and you will find plenty about it in print and on the Internet.

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*I have found a Miss Jean Milligan who was an educator, presenter, and assistant director at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York. She was supposed to have been a native of Youngstown, Ohio, rather than Cleveland. This Jean Milligan attended Oberlin College and taught art there for a time. She worked in Rochester from 1946 to 1951, when she took a position at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This doesn't sound like our woman, but there isn't anything here that rules her out except for her supposed birth in Youngstown. There is a photograph of a Jean Milligan in an Oberlin College yearbook of the right vintage, but that Jean doesn't look like our Jean. I think we'll have to go on looking.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley