Before becoming the originator of so much of our science fiction, H.G. Wells trained as a zoologist and biologist. His first book was a textbook of biology called--what else?--Text-Book of Biology, published in 1893. Being in the public domain, every other book published in the nineteenth century is available to us on line. Text-Book of Biology seems to be an exception. Good luck in your search for its full text and illustrations, if there are any.
We recognize the strangeness or alienness of certain types of organisms. Viruses (if they are indeed alive), fungi, and cephalopods confound us. There are some who believe them to be from outer space. As a zoologist or biologist, Wells may have had similar apprehensions, although he may not have been aware of the existence of viruses, which weren't discovered, or at least indicated, until the 1890s. In any case, Wells got in on the nineteenth-century literary habit of writing about giant cephalopods in "The Sea Raiders," a short story from 1896. I'm more interested in his tentacled Martians from The War of the Worlds, serialized in Pearson's Magazine and Cosmopolitan in 1897 and published in hardback the following year.
From Book One, Chapter IV: The Cylinder Opens:
Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.
The Martians' machines also have tentacles:
Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman’s basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone.
A more thorough description of Martian anatomy and physiology--like that written by a biologist or zoologist, of which H.G. Wells was one--is in Book Two, Chapter II of The War of the Worlds.
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I'll cut to the chase: I think that H.G. Wells' Martians from The War of the Worlds were the prototype of the tentacled or octopoid alien in science fiction, then called pseudo-scientific fiction or scientific romance. From there, tentacles wormed their way into other genres, including science fantasy and weird fiction. I think it was Wells' training as a zoologist and biologist that inspired his leap of imagination. I think he recognized and articulated the alienness of tentacled creatures, more broadly creatures with radial symmetry, and that's why we have such things in our fantasy fiction. It seems unlikely to me that the authors of weird fiction were alone responsible for that development or for initiating that development. I'm not sure that weird fiction as tentacled fiction really works as an idea.
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Anthony M. Rud was the son of two medical doctors. He studied medicine, too, before settling on the writing life. In other words, he, like Wells, received an education in biology, anatomy, physiology, and so on. Writing a story about a giant amoeba would presumably have been within his area of expertise. In "Ooze," he even employed terms such as karyokinesis, protoplasm, nucleolous, and contractile vacuole.
"Ooze," the first cover story in Weird Tales (Mar. 1923), is a proto-science-fictional or science fantasy story. Rud used an older term in his own story. He wrote:
As readers of popular fiction know well, Lee Cranmer's forte was the writing of what is called--among fellows in the craft--the pseudo-scientific story. In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or whatnot, which carries to logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.
In certain fashion these men are allies of science. Often they visualize something which has not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility. In a large way Jules Verne was one of these men in his day; Lee Cranmer bade fair to carry on the work in worthy fashion--work taken up for a period by an Englishman named Wells, but abandoned for stories of a different--and, in my humble opinion, less absorbing--type. [Emphasis added.]
Here, then, is direct evidence for the influence of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells on Anthony Rud, and perhaps partly through him, on weird fiction. By the way, Rud used the exact phrase "weird tales" early on in "Ooze," making him the first author in "The Unique Magazine" to include those words together in his or her story.
Despite its octopoid appearance on the cover of Weird Tales, Rud's monster is in fact a giant amoeba. Here's a brief description of the creature:
Rori failed to explain in full, but something, a slimy, amorphous something, which glistened in the sunlight, already had engulfed the man to his shoulders! Breath was cut off. Joe's contorted face writhed with horror and beginning suffocation. One hand--all that was free of the rest of him!--beat feebly upon the rubbery, translucent thing that was engulfing his body!
Another description, from early on in the creature's development:
This amoeba, a rubbery, amorphous mass of protoplasm, was of the size then of a large beef liver.
Then, the scene apparently illustrated on that famous first cover arrives:
Of a sudden her screams cut the still air! Without her knowledge, ten-foot pseudopods--those flowing tentacles of protoplasm sent forth by the sinister occupant of the pool--slid out and around her putteed ankles.
For a moment she did not understand. Then, at first suspicion of the horrid truth, her cries rent the air. Lee, at that time struggling to lace a pair of high shoes, straightened, paled, and grabbed a revolver as he dashed out.
In another room a scientist, absorbed in his notetaking, glanced up, frowned, and then--recognizing the voice--shed his white gown and came out. He was too late to do aught but gasp with horror.
In the yard Peggy was half engulfed in a squamous, rubbery something which at first glance he could not analyze.
Lee, his boy, was fighting with the sticky folds, and slowly, surely, losing his own grip upon the earth!
* * *
Alien invaders came into Weird Tales in April 1925 with Nictzin Dyalhis' novelette "When the Green Star Waned." The author's description of his aliens owes a little to Wells' Martians, I think:
And here we found life, such as it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok's height, with a gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.
Note the triangular mouth and the emphasis on the eyes. Note also that the alien is described as "a huge pulpy blob." Later in the story, the things are referred to as "blob-things." So maybe they have similarities not only to Wells' Martians but also to Rud's giant amoeba--and Joseph Payne Brennan's later great slime, inspiration for the Blob of movie fame.
Dyalhis' aliens don't have tentacles, even if the cover illustration shows tentacle-like appendages pointing upward. (That illustration appears to be based on the following passage.) Instead, they have arms:
They, the Things, slowly raised each an arm, pointed at one Aerthon in the group. He, back to them as he was, quivered, shook, writhed, then, despite himself, he slowly rose in the air, moved out into space, hung above the blobs that waited, avid-mouthed. The Aerthon turned over in the air, head down, still upheld by the concentrated wills of the things that pointed . . .
Science fiction still hadn't been adequately named when Dyalhis wrote "When the Green Star Waned." I'm not sure that the term "science fantasy" had appeared yet, either. Nonetheless, I think "When the Green Star Waned" might better be described as science fantasy than as science fiction. The same is true, I think, of "The Call of Cthulhu," from Weird Tales, February 1928. There are science-fictional elements in H.P. Lovecraft's seminal mythos story to be sure, but his purpose was more nearly weird-fictional. The what-ifs of science fiction don't really enter into his storytelling, and the emphasis is on the past, not on the future: "The Call of Cthulhu" is a story of decadence, not of scientific progress.
From "The Call of Cthulhu":
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.
Later, in the encounter with the monster himself:
There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where--God in heaven!--the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
If you have read "Ooze," you will remember that there are fish smells and nastiness in that story, too.
* * *
Tentacles (and radial symmetry) are in lots of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. I count them in "The Dunwich Horror" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1929), At the Mountains of Madness (Astounding Stories, Feb.-Apr. 1931), and The Shadow Out of Time (Astounding Stories, June 1936). All involve scientists and scientific investigations of one kind or another, just as in "Ooze." There are tentacles in other stories written by Lovecraft alone and in collaboration with others, too.
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"Shambleau" by C.L. Moore (Weird Tales, Nov. 1933) is a story of science fantasy. Set on Mars, it involves the title character, an alien creature with vampire appetites. She afflicts poor Northwest Smith of Earth with an awful and irresistible desire:
The red folds loosened, and--he knew then that he had not dreamed--again a scarlet lock swung down against her cheek . . . a hair, was it? a lock of hair? . . . thick as a thick worm it fell, plumply, against that smooth cheek . . . more scarlet than blood and thick as a crawling worm . . . and like a worm it crawled.
Smith rose on an elbow, not realizing the motion, and fixed an unwinking stare, with a sort of sick, fascinated incredulity, on that--that lock of hair. He had not dreamed. Until now he had taken it for granted that it was the segir which had made it seem to move on that evening before. But now . . . it was lengthening, stretching, moving of itself. It must be hair, but it crawled; with a sickening life of its own it squirmed down against her cheek, caressingly, revoltingly, impossibly. . . . Wet, it was, and round and thick and shining . . . .
She unfastened the last fold and whipped the turban off. From what he saw then Smith would have turned his eyes away--and he had looked on dreadful things before, without flinching--but he could not stir. He could only lie there on his elbow staring at the mass of scarlet, squirming--worms, hairs, what?--that writhed over her head in a dreadful mockery of ringlets.
And it was lengthening, falling, somehow growing before his eyes, down over her shoulders in a spilling cascade, a mass that even at the beginning could never have been hidden under the skull-tight turban she had worn. He was beyond wondering, but he realized that. And still it squirmed and lengthened and fell, and she shook it out in a horrible travesty of a woman shaking out her unbound hair--until the unspeakable tangle of it--twisting, writhing, obscenely scarlet--hung to her waist and beyond, and still lengthened, an endless mass of crawling horror that until now, somehow, impossibly, had been hidden under the tight-bound turban. It was like a nest of blind, restless red worms it was--it was like naked entrails endowed with an unnatural aliveness, terrible beyond words.
Some readers might find that passage repetitive. I don't see it that way. Instead, I see a building of effect, a characteristic of weird fiction. I think it's an extraordinary piece of writing for a woman in her early twenties.
Towards the end of "Shambleau," Smith tells his sidekick Yarol what he has experienced:
"I only know that when I felt--when those tentacles closed around my legs--I didn't want to pull loose, I felt sensations that--that--oh, I'm fouled and filthy to the very deepest part of me by that--pleasure--and yet . . . . "
By the way, Martians are the threat in The War of the Worlds and "Shambleau." Bacteria save us in The War of the Worlds. Venerians come to the rescue in "When the Green Star Waned" and again in "Shambleau."
* * *
From all of this, I think we can take a few things about tentacles in fantasy fiction:
First, tentacles seem to have come into fantasy fiction by way of science and the pseudoscience, semi-science, or quasi-science of cryptozoology, then by way of the pseudo-scientific fiction, science fantasy, scientific romances, and finally science fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seems to me that an interest in tentacles is scientific and progressive, not folkloric or traditional.
Second, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, clearly a science fiction story, seems a very likely entry point for tentacles into fantasy fiction of all types, including weird fiction. There are tentacles in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, too, but they are the appendages of an earthly animal, not of a creature or being from the other side. Wells was a prototype of the scientist who becomes an author of science fiction, and when he became an author, he brought tentacles along with him.
Third, tentacles probably represent something that we don't easily apprehend, something strange, alien, otherworldly, terrifying, and dreadful, also, nasty, disgusting, nauseating, inhuman, and monstrous, and of course enfolding, enclosing, and engulfing. Tentacled aliens drink blood or energy or life-force in The War of the Worlds and "Shambleau." They are of course the threat in those two stories, plus in "The Call of Cthulhu." The aliens in "When the Green Star Waned" are not tentacled, but they are alien and a threat nonetheless. Only in "Ooze" is the threat something of this earth, even if it has been altered by Frankensteinian (my new word) science. Although it looks to be tentacled on the cover, Rud's giant amoeba sends out seeking and engulfing pseudopodia instead.
Fourth, tentacles don't stand alone--or creep and crawl alone. They are part of an organism that may also be gelatinous, amorphous, rubbery, pulpy, bloated, blobby, twisting, crawling, writhing, and so on, in short, not like us in any way. Significantly, tentacled creatures very often have radial rather than bilateral symmetry. That alone sets them apart from us and most of our fellow-creatures as something bizarre, alien, and otherworldly (Herman Melville's word from Moby Dick).
If weird fiction is about a crossing over of some kind, then the alienness of the creature with tentacles might be a perfect fit into the genre. Maybe that's why it was on the cover of the first issue of Weird Tales and why it appeared again and again in weird fiction and science fiction.
Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
Buon compleanno, F.M.E.
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