The Return of "Ooze"

I have a couple of things left over concerning the first Weird Tales cover story, "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. I also have something new.

The first Weird Tales cover and the only illustration in the first issue was Richard R. Epperly's depiction of the events in "Ooze." Epperly's illustration isn't of just one scene from "Ooze," though. In fact, it combines different characters and different parts of the story into one image.

In the illustration, a young man rushes in from the left, brandishing a rifle and a long knife. In the center of the image is a frightened young women in the grip of a monster, a kind of land-octopus.

However, in the story, Lee Cranmer, the son, is first on the scene. He carries only a rifle.

John Corliss Cranmer, the father, is next to arrive. By the time he is on the scene with his pistol and knife, his son and daughter-in-law have already been engulfed by the giant amoeba.

The wall, shown in the background of the illustration, comes later in the story. John Corliss Cranmer has it built in order to keep the amoeba from escaping.

And of course the creature is not octopoidal (if that's a word) but protoplasmic, an eyeless and limbless colloidal creature made from ooze.

And in the story to ooze it returned.

* * *

After beginning this long series on the origins of ooze and the first issue of Weird Tales, I read "A Song for Lya" by George R.R. Martin. This was part of our weird fiction book club, conducted by my friend Nathaniel Wallace. Thanks always to Nate.

"A Song for Lya" was first published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in June 1974, forty-nine years ago this month. In other words, Mr. Martin's story came along about halfway between "Ooze" and now. It shows how much things had changed in the time before and how little they seem to have changed in the time since it was published. Anthony M. Rud came of age before the Great War. His story is set in 1913, in the year before the war began, you might say before a long, sad withdrawing of the sea of faith that formerly ringed the world, or, at least at that late date, America. Now we find ourselves high and dry.

In both stories, there is the image of a woman being absorbed by a blob or protoplasmic mass. In "Ooze," that image is horrifying, so much so that it drives the elder Cranmer insane. That shocking and terrible image, though not made so vivid in Rud's prose, is very vivid in my own imagination. It sticks with me even now. It's no wonder that Cranmer's mind went off its hinges, for he had seen what he had wrought in the most terrible of ways.

George R.R. Martin described his own ooze-like creature:

Its color was a dull brownish red, like old blood, not the bright near-translucent crimson of the small creatures that clung to the skulls of the Joined. There were spots of black, too, like burns or soot stains on the vasty body. I could barely see the far side of the cave; the Greeshka was too huge, it towered above us so that there was only a thin crack between it and the roof. But it sloped down abruptly halfway across the chamber, like an immense jellied hill, and ended a good twenty feet from where we stood.

And what it looks like when the creature, called the Greeshka, absorbs one of the natives of his faraway planet, the Shkeen:

     I looked. His beam had thrown a pool of light around one of the dark spots, a blemish on the reddish hulk. I looked closer. There was a head in the blemish. Centered in the dark spot, with just the face showing, and even that covered by a thin reddish film. But the features were unmistakable. An elderly Shkeen, wrinkled and big-eyed, his eyes closed now. But smiling. Smiling.

     I moved closer. A little lower and to the right, a few fingertips hung out of the mass. But that was all. Most of the body was already gone, sunken into the Greeshka, dissolved or dissolving. The old Shkeen was dead, and the parasite was digesting his corpse.

That is soon to be the fate of the title character, who seeks union and in realizing it leaves her lover, named Robb, behind. He's devastated, but maybe only a little and not for long. (Strange devastation.) On his way off of the planet, he hooks up with another woman, who is also seeking union but has failed to achieve it with her now ex-boyfriend, the planetary administrator Valcarenghi. Valcarenghi is an individual, with boundaries he has established around himself like the wall Cranmer has built to keep in the amoeba. He does not seek an individual- or boundary-dissolving union with another person. He also believes in God, though perhaps only in an offhand way. He appears to be an untroubled man, or a man who keeps himself and any troubles he might have very carefully under control.

In "Ooze," union with a colloidal creature is terrible and horrifying. No one wants it. The woman, John Corliss Cranmer's daughter-in-law, goes to her doom involuntarily. She is the prey of the amoeba. In Mr. Martin's story, on the other hand, union is made to seem somehow attractive and desirable. The title character Lya willingly goes to her own dissolution. She wants to lose herself and be joined in love with others within the mass of the Greeshka. Cranmer, creator of the giant amoeba, believes in God. Lya and her lover Robb do not. They are devoutly atheistic. By turning away from God, Lya believes that her only hope for love and union is--to reduce things in the way materialism and reductionism require--to be dissolved in protoplasm. To his credit, Robb doesn't want to go out that way.

In the twentieth century, as in all others, there were those who burned with a desire to lose their identities and their individuality by being taken into a mass of men. This was one of the insights behind The True Believer, subtitled Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, written by Eric Hoffer and published in 1951. Little is known of Hoffer's origins or early life. Call him the Nictzin Dyalhis of a wider American philosophy and culture. He is supposed to have been an atheist, like Lya and Robb, who observes, "The Union is a mass-mind, an immortal mass-mind, many in one, all love." Mr. Martin may be an atheist, too. I can't say for sure. But that seeking after love and union, seemingly so necessary among us, also satisfied by a belief in God and actions based on such a belief, would also seem to be behind the worldly or atheistic drive after the dissolution of the self and of individual identity and autonomy. God offers us one thing. We refuse it and desire to replace it with something of our own making. Like children, we want to do it ourselves. And in the process, we--either gradually or suddenly--destroy ourselves or as much of the rest of humanity as we can. We need look no further than the murderous mass movements of the twentieth century--still alive in our own--as evidence of that. We seek after the eternal, the infinite, and the absolute without seeing that our seeking is in itself evidence of the Creator of all things eternal, infinite, and absolute.

I'll close by saying that being dissolved in protoplasm is in my view horrifying in both "Ooze" and "A Song for Lya." The difference is that it's made to sound not so horrifying and to be actually desirable in "A Song for Lya," at least by some of the characters in that story. I suppose that readers of today prefer the later horror over the earlier one, even if both are essentially the same. What a difference a century--actually only half a century, 1923 to 1974--has made.

"A Song for Lya" by George R.R. Martin was originally in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in June 1974. The cover art, by Frank Kelly Freas, is for a serial entitled "Stargate." Interior illustrations for "A Song for Lya" were by James Odbert. This is where the connections begin.

The author of "Stargate" was Tak Hallus, a pen name, the meaning of which, in Urdu and Persian, is apparently "pen name." In "A Song for Lya," the title character's lover is named Robb. I can't help but associate his name with the word robot, more distantly with the character Robby the Robot, in other words, with something mechanical, material, and non-human.

"Stargate" is also the title of a television show. The premise of the show seems to be based in an older concept, one example of which is in the novel Gateway (1977) and its sequels, written by Frederik Pohl. The main character in Pohl's Gateway is named Robinette. He is human. His psychoanalyst, a robot named Sigfrid, is not, though, like Pinocchio and Data, he wishes to be.

Anyway, like I said, Tak Hallus is a pen name. (It sounds like a character name in one of Nictzin Dyalhis' stories of Venhez and Aerth.) The author's real name was Robinett, Stephen Robinett to be exact, who also went by the name Stephen Robinette.

Robinett's first genre story was "Minitalent," also in Analog, in March 1969. In "A Song for Lya," the psychics Lya and Robb are called Talents, for their psychic powers. So in 1974, when "A Song for Lya" was published, decades had gone by and yet there were still stories about psychic powers in Analog, which was, before that, called Astounding Science Fiction, and which was, of course, edited by a man who believed he had discovered a scientific basis for such things. We're still waiting for his results.

I haven't read "Stargate" by Stephen Robinett. But I wonder if Frederik Pohl could have been inspired by him and his story in conceiving and writing his own novel Gateway. Or maybe his use of the character name Robinette is just a coincidence.

By the way, Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" (1867) figures very prominently in "A Song for Lya." I sneaked in an allusion to it earlier in this essay. "Dover Beach" is an essential poem. Anyone who reads in English ought to read it and know it and return to it, again and again, like a wave on the beach.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley