Weird Tales, March 1923: Tentacles-Part One

The first cover story in Weird Tales is called "Ooze." It was written by Anthony M. Rud. The monster in the story is a giant amoeba. In Richard R. Epperly's cover drawing, it looks more like an octopus with long, reaching tentacles. I don't know why Epperly drew his monster that way. Maybe he or the editor or publisher thought that people would know at a glance what an octopus is. An amorphous blob of protoplasm isn't so easy to recognize.

There are lots of tentacles in weird fiction. I have read a reference to tentacles as being in fact representative of the genre. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the original source, China Miéville's article "Weird Fiction" in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, et al. (2009). I can offer two examples of tentacles and tentacled creatures as a subject of weird fiction. One is a critical or analytical work, "'Comrades in Tentacles': H. P. Lovecraft and China Miéville" by Martyn Colebrook in New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft (2013). The other is Mr. Miéville's own novel Kraken, from 2010. In case you didn't know it, things from 2010 are considered new, as in the phrase "the New Weird."

The idea that tentacles are representative of weird fiction may be mostly China Miéville's. There appears to be some theorizing behind it and the theorizing appears to be his. I haven't read Mr. Miéville's writing on the subject, but I believe he's correct in tracing tentacles in fiction to the late nineteenth century. However, my own research leads me to believe that tentacles didn't come from weird fiction so much as from science, pseudoscience--especially cryptozoology--science fiction, and the precursors of science fiction, including pseudo-scientific fiction, science fantasy, and scientific romances.

Cryptozoologists trace the beginning of their field (I won't call it a discipline--it takes discipline to be a discipline) to the late nineteenth century, but the study of unknown animals actually goes back centuries. In order for any pursuit to become a science, though, there first has to be science. Science didn't have a start date, although it seems to have recently developed an expiration date, which was yesterday or the day before. I guess we should just say that science evolved from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. And that's when Pierre Dénys de Montfort (1766-1820) lived, that is, at the end of that period. Montfort studied mollusks, a group of animals that seem almost alien to us, one that includes octopuses, squids, nautiluses, and cuttlefish. You know Montfort's work, even if only by one image, that of the kraken, a legendary creature he believed to be a giant octopus. Montfort's theorizing began after he had read about the discovery of a great tentacle in the mouth of a whale. In other words, Weird Tales began with tentacles and so did cryptozoology. Anyway, Montfort believed in the giant octopus, so much so that he attributed the loss of a British flotilla to the kraken's depredations. He was wrong and died in poverty and shame. In other words, there was a time when people who were wrong about things were punished rather than rewarded. Now it's the other way around.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson immortalized the kraken in his poem of the same name, from 1830:

The Kraken
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. 

It's a strange and vivid, a frightening and apocalyptic poem. There is a faint or not so faint awareness of the natural sciences in its lines, most detectable in Tennyson's use of the Greek word polypi. Polypi is plural, of course, and refers to an archaic word for octopus or cuttlefish, polypus, meaning, more or less "many-footed." The French word for octopus is poulpe. Despite the similarity, there is apparently no relationship between the words poulpe and pulp. So, no, pulp fiction is not poulpe fiction and not the literature of octopuses, or of the tentacle. But wouldn't it have been a nice way to draw a circle?

Anyway, it seems clear that the Kraken in Tennyson's poem is a greater creature than the "[u]nnumbered and enormous polypi" that seem to attend it. But we don't have a description: the Kraken remains a mysterious creature, a great natural or perhaps supernatural force. If you detect Cthulhu in Tennyson's versifying, you're probably on to something. Author Robert Price was apparently the first to draw a connection between "The Kraken" and H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu" from nigh on a hundred years later. I think the similarities of the latter to the former are unavoidable. Good work, Mr. Price.

(Update, Feb. 22, 2023): In Moby Dick (1851), there is a sighting of but no battle with a giant squid. The author Herman Melville described the creature in Chapter 59, called "Squid":

A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life. 

Note the references to the squid as a "vast pulpy mass" and as "unearthly" and "formless." There will be more descriptions like these in the next part of this series.

There's a battle with an octopus in The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo (1866). Three years later, a giant squid appeared in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (published 1869-1870). Verne wrote before there was such a named thing as science fiction. His works were something new or almost new in the world, though, and so there had to be some kind of name for stories of their type. In a discussion of literary items published on November 28, 1884 (p. 6), the Boston Evening Transcript referred to "Jules Verne's stories, with their magic machinery of pseudo-science." That's the earliest example I have found of Verne's name coupled with the term "pseudo-science." "[M]agic machinery" refers to what some people might call super-science or superscience, like in the James Bond movies or Marvel Comics. There was also a pulp magazine called Super Science Stories. You can see one of its tentacle covers below.

My purpose isn't to trace the history of the terms "pseudo-science" or "pseudo-scientific," but now that I'm on it, I might as well keep going for a while. And--holy cow!--I found the phrases "weird tale" and "pseudo-scientific stories" in the same article--and it's from 1896, the decade during which pop culture began in America!

     The leading story of the Argonaut of July 6 is "The Mines of Mars." It was written by Maria Roberts, who, some time ago, had a very striking story in the Argonaut entitled "The Mystery of Asenath."

     The present story is a weird tale of a clairvoyant's two trip [sic] through space to the distant planet that many now suppose to be inhabited, and is one of those pseudo-scientific stories for which the Argonaut has long been celebrated. (Los Gatos Mail, July 7, 1896, p. 5).

(The phrase "pseudoscientific tale" didn't come until later, in the Pittsburgh Daily Post, December 5, 1908, page 5, in regards to Campbell MacCullough's story "The Fourth Dimension.")

Maria Roberts' story, in the San Francisco Argonaut, from January 11, 1892, was actually entitled "The Sorcery of Asenath." It's about Voodoo and it's set in the American South. A brief newspaper review called it "weird and uncanny in the extreme," so there are those two words again. "The Sorcery of Asenath" was reprinted in Argonaut Stories, edited by Jerome Hart and published in 1906. It was also reprinted in the New Orleans Crescent. You will remember that I wrote recently about another story in the Crescent, this one called "A Christmas Reminiscence," from Christmastime, 1868. It was written by a pseudonymous author calling herself Hagar. Her subject was also Voodoo or Voudou.

By the way, no one knows anything about Maria Roberts. She may have been a teacher in California. She is in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database only by name and for her authorship of "The Sorcery of Asenath." We should add "The Mines of Mars: A Weird Tale of a Clairvoyant's Two Trips Through Space" to her credits. That story was in The Argonaut for July 6, 1896. The Argonaut should not be confused with Argosy, the American magazine that ushered in the pulp era in its issue of December 1896. It won't, of course, be confused with the short story "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888) by an author whose name is going to come up really, really soon, like if you were traveling in a time machine to the end of this article.

Proto-science fiction or science fantasy stories were sometimes called "pseudo-scientific." The term "pseudoscience" was and is also used to describe fields of endeavor that make out like they're scientific but really aren't. Phrenology is a good example. The Hollow Earth theory is another. Cryptozoology is kind of split. Looking for, discovering, and describing previously unknown animals is a legitimate scientific endeavor. The okapi, finally described by Europeans in 1901, is kind of the spirit animal of cryptozoologists. On the other side of the coin are people who go out on weekends looking for Bigfoot at the local state park. Cryptozoology as a quasi-scientific, semi-scientific, or pseudoscientific field got its start in 1892--when else?--and the publication of crypto- and just plain zoologist Antoon Cornelis Oudemans' book The Great Sea Serpent, and so we're back to monsters of the sea, except that Oudemans theorized that sea serpents are actually some unknown species of giant seal. So no tentacles.

The point of all this is that tentacles in weird fiction are probably not from folklore, myths, legends, fairy tales, weird tales, or any other old or traditional form but instead from science, pseudoscience, and pseudo-scientific fiction from the nineteenth century. That's what the evidence seems to show. In order to make the leap--or crawl the creep, I guess--into science fiction, tentacles needed treatment from a biologically trained author. Anthony M. Rud, whose parents were medical doctors and who studied to be a doctor, too, was one of them. But he was preceded by another and far more well-known author with a background in biology. His name was H.G. Wells.

To be continued . . .

First and Last Tentacles

The first issue of Weird Tales has tentacles on the cover. So does the most recent issue, Number 366, the Sword & Sorcery Issue, from 2023. Number 366 also has a side-by-side kind of cover: On the left is a Cthulhoid monster--you might as well call him Cthulhu--while on the right is the swordsman of heroic fantasy. On the left: A Lovecraftian monster. On the right: A Howardian hero.

Pierre Dénys de Montfort's "Le Poulpe Colossal 1801," the Giant Octopus or Kraken of cryptozoology.

Classics Illustrated #56, illustrating The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo, from February 1949. Cover artist unknown. 

An illustration for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, from a 1922 edition, illustrated by Milo Winter (1888-1956). That's a nice picture.

A record cover for Jonny Quest in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, presented by Hanna-Barbera Records in 1965. Even under water, Race Bannon's hair stays in place.

The works of Jules Verne and many writers after him were characterized by super-science, what a reviewer from 1884 called "[m]agic machinery." Super-science isn't usually real science but a magical kind of science or technology that requires a suspension of disbelief in order for it to work. In 1940, Popular Publications (not to be confused with the Popular Fiction Company that published Weird Tales) began publishing Super Science Stories. Here is the cover for the second issue, May 1940, with art by Gabriel Mayorga (1911-1988). That looks like airbrushed art. Maybe Mayorga knew Alex Schomburg, who was a master of that tool.

Here's a bonus, the cover of Peril, The All Man's Magazine, from October 1956: another first issue, another tentacled creature on the attack.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley