If it had not been the cover story in that first issue of Weird Tales, Anthony M. Rud's "Ooze" might now be forgotten. Instead, it was reprinted in the expanded and enhanced edition of The Weird Tales Story (2021) and is now available as an ebook. It has also been the subject of recent commentary, analysis, and criticism.
A century separates us from "Ooze." The world from which it came is gone forever. What do we know--what can we know?--of its origins or the context in which it written? Only a little? Or maybe a lot? If we follow some lines of inquiry--if we investigate today in the same way Rud's narrator investigated the events at that ruined house on the edge of Moccasin Swamp--maybe we can discover more about the origins of "Ooze."
"Ooze" would seem to have been something fairly new in its time, a work of science fiction before that genre was so named. Remember that Weird Tales was the first American magazine devoted to stories of fantasy. In March 1923, Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction magazine, was still three years in the future, while the term science fiction would have to wait until near the end of the decade before it appeared. Although "Ooze" wasn't the first science fiction story to appear in an American magazine, we can call it the first to appear in Weird Tales. That's easy enough.
"Ooze" is more than just an early science fiction story, however. It's also an implicitly self-conscious story. It knows what it is, and because of that, it might also be called metafictional. (1) The first-person narrator in "Ooze" comments on his missing friend:
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.
He proceeds to define the pseudo-scientific story:
In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology, or what-not, which carries to logical conclusion improved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.
(That's a curious expression: "nadirs of fact." It makes me think of Charles Fort.)
In the paragraph that follows, the narrator mentions Jules Verne and "an Englishman named Wells" as authors of the pseudo-scientific story, observing:
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.
(Remember that Charles Fort also called his clippings "data.")
I have said before that the artist is the canary in the coal mine of culture. Rud seems to have been saying the same kind of thing here.
It's no wonder that "Ooze" was the first cover story in Weird Tales, for here within a work of fiction rather than in any editorial or literary manifesto (such as in "Why Weird Tales?" from a year later) is a definition and a guide to the reader as to just what this is all about. It's a kind of announcement: in this magazine, you will read stories of a certain type, stories based on extrapolations of what we know about the physical universe. Significantly, Rud included anthropology in his short list of fields of inquiry: now the doors are thrown open to the human-inhabited universe as well.
The phrase "weird tales" appears in "Ooze." It is applied to stories told by locals about what they call "Daid House," Cranmer's mysteriously ruined backwoods lodge. If "Ooze" is metafictional in one way, it might be in another, too, for it is a science-fiction story told about weird-fictional events, using some of the conventions of weird fiction. The narrator solves the mystery at Dead House by conducting a series of interviews. In other words, using a scientific or journalistic approach, he gathers a series of weird tales about weird events that took place in a weird-fictional setting, involving a super-scientist and his son, a writer of pseudo-scientific stories, the result being an early science-fiction story published in a magazine called Weird Tales.
Again, "Ooze" is self-conscious. It seems to have served as a simultaneous statement of purpose and an introduction, welcome, and guide to readers. So, did Rud write "Ooze" specifically for publication in Weird Tales? Maybe. Maybe not. His narrator's investigations take place in 1913, a full decade before that first issue was published. Rud was still a student in 1913. He was also a budding teller of tales. We know from his first letter in "The Eyrie" that he wrote "A Square of Canvas" while he was still in college. Maybe "Ooze" dates from that period as well. On the other hand, we know from Katherine Hopkins Chapman's article that he spent the winter and spring of 1921 in Citronelle, Alabama, where he had gathered material for at least a couple of stories. So maybe we can say that "Ooze" is from about 1921-1922. Anyway, we can speculate that Rud functioned as a kind of literary agent for writers or as a kind of talent scout for Weird Tales. He seems to have been, at the very least, a connection to tellers of weird tales in Alabama. Whether he just lucked onto Weird Tales--and it lucked onto him--or the magazine actually sought him out, with "Ooze" as a result, Anthony M. Rud played his part in the early success of "The Unique Magazine," such as it was.
Science fiction wasn't fully formed when the first issue of Weird Tales arrived, but neither was weird fiction. Although it has its weird-fictional elements, "Ooze" is more nearly science-fictional than weird-fictional. In his story, Rud referred to Verne and Wells. Absent by name are authors such as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, whom we recognize as among the originators of weird fiction. (We should always remember the anonymous authors of Beowulf, too.) Both wrote what we might call proto-science fiction, but both might better be characterized as Gothic and Romantic authors, as authors who told tales of passion, vengeance, and the extremities of emotion, of irrationality, horror, terror, and madness. On the other hand, what is "Ooze" but just another instance of Frankensteinian science? Of an overweening pride in science and reason rather than an understanding of human frailty and the workings of human nature as the determiners of our fate?
It seems clear to me that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells--especially Wells--were Anthony Rud's models in writing "Ooze." Rud was, after all, trained in science and medicine, just as Wells had been. "Ooze" is an account by a first-person narrator of investigations carried out in a pretty even scientific or journalistic manner. The first-person narrator in The War of the Worlds is also, for example, a writer. (2) Wells' seminal works of science fiction were less than thirty years old when Rud wrote. Most were published in the same decade in which Rud was born. By the time Rud was a teenager--in other words, after his Golden Age of Twelve had passed--Wells had moved on. Rud's narrator in "Ooze" doesn't like that very much, commenting that, although Wells wrote pseudo-scientific stories for a time, he abandoned them "for stories of a different--and, in my humble opinion, less absorbing--type."
So I think that the origins of "Ooze" can be traced to the works of H.G. Wells, but I would also go back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was first published in 1818, and to other Gothic and Romantic tales of passion and madness, Moby Dick for example. (3) There's reason to believe that the origins of "Ooze" preceded even Frankenstein, though. And thereby hangs a tale of a scientific--more accurately a pseudoscientific--controversy from so long ago that no one now remembers it.
To be continued . . .
Notes
(1) I'm not the first to use the term metafictional in reference to "Ooze." See "American Weird" by Roger Luckhurst in The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015).
(2) In the Mercury Theatre adaptation of 1938, the narrators are a number of reporters and--in the voice of Orson Welles--a surviving scientist. Thirty years later, WKBW Radio of Buffalo, New York, broadcast a second adaptation of Wells' story in which, again, radio reporters narrate the Martian invasion of Earth.
(3) The second English edition of Frankenstein, with Mary Shelley's byline, was published in 1823, making this year its bicentenary.
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