Weird Tales at Sixty

Phil Stephenson-Payne has confirmed that Lin Carter's Weird Tales #4, from 1983, was in fact an anniversary issue. He has supplied an excerpt from Carter's essay in that issue:

By the time this issue reaches the stand, Weird Tales will have entered its sixtieth year, so this is by way of being an anniversary issue to The Unique Magazine.

By this issue, the 287th, we have published (at a conservative estimate), some 14,713,000 words . . . yes, fourteen million, seven hundred and thirteen thousand words of the finest stories in the modern literature of the macabre.

As seems only befitting, we are celebrating this anniversary in a "unique" manner: that is, we are happy to present herein two contributions, written especially for Weird Tales, by two writers who, between them, represent virtually the entire history of this extraordinary magazine. The first of these is Frank Belknap Long, who made his first appearance in these pages in 1924, our second year of publication. Mr. Long, a youthful protege of the great H.P. Lovecraft and a prolific and gifted writer in his own right, has contributed fiction and verse to no fewer than forty-seven issues of the magazine. He appears in this issue with a new story, aptly entitled "Homecoming."

Our second "anniversary item" is the work of one of our most distinguished alumni, Mr. Ray Bradbury. While Mr. Long was the first major discovery of WT's most famous editor, Farnsworth Wright, Mr. Bradbury was an early discovery of Dorothy Mcllwraith, who succeeded Farnsworth Wright to the prestigious editorial chair. His first story appeared in our issue for November, 1942, eighteen years after the debut of Frank Belknap Long, and over the years his distinctive short-stories have adorned some twenty-seven issues of Weird Tales. His last appearance here was in our Fall, 1973 issue, while Mr. Long's last appearance here was in the issue dated Summer, 1974.

Between the two of these gifted gentlemen, then, they span most of the entire history of Weird Tales--two hundred and seventy-three issues, anyway--which explains why, to us, they represent the history of the Unique Magazine. And we are delighted to welcome them back to this sixtieth anniversary issue of the magazine in which they both were first published.

* * *

One final word on this sixtieth anniversary issue, and then we will turn the page over to our correspondents. Our Weird Tales 'First' department has become a regular fixture in this new series, and for this very special issue it seems only fitting and proper to reprint a story from the very first issue of this magazine, that of March, 1923.

Among the twenty-four stories, and the first part of a serial, which appeared in that historic first issue, only one tale has survived the generations to become something of a modem classic in horror fiction. Often anthologized, it seems appropriate to reprint it at this time . . . "Ooze," by Anthony M. Rud.

(Boldface added.)

Thank you, Mr. Stephenson-Payne.

Weird Tales #4 (1983), edited by Lin Carter, with cover art by Doug Beekman.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: Years without Anniversaries

Weird Tales was in print from March 1923 to September 1954. The magazine sometimes observed its own anniversary. Sometimes it was the readers who did the observing in their letters to "The Eyrie." The most prominent anniversary issues were the first, in May/June/July 1924, and the twenty-fifth, in March 1948. Weird Tales was not in print from October 1954 until the summer of 1973. If there were observances of anniversaries during those years, they would have been in other places and under other banners. If there were such observances, I don't know anything about them.

I wrote the other day that Sam Moskowitz is supposed to have dissuaded Leo Margulies from bringing Weird Tales back into print. Now I have a source for that information. In Weird Tales #1, edited by Lin Carter and published in 1980, Moskowitz wrote:

     I twice talked Leo Margulies out of reviving the magazine, once in 1958 and again in the sixties, because I thought he would lose his shirt. (p. 266)

So if  Margulies had gone ahead with bringing back Weird Tales in 1958, maybe it would have been just in time for the thirty-fifth anniversary of "The Unique Magazine."

There weren't any issues and no revivals at all during the 1960s, although now I find that two of the Pyramid paperback anthologies about which I wrote the other day were intended as the start of a series. In Weird Tales #1, Sam Moskowitz revealed:

     I ghost edited for Leo Margulies the Pyramid paperbacks Weird Tales (1964) and Worlds of Weird (1965), which were intended to be a series, with covers and some interiors by Virgil Finlay. They apparently did not do well enough to justify continuing the series [. . .]. (p. 265)

Moskowitz went on to put together the fiftieth-anniversary issue of Weird Tales in Summer 1973 and three more issues in that brief four-issue revival. There wasn't any forty-fifth anniversary issue in 1968, nor a fifty-fifth anniversary issue in 1978, again, because Weird Tales was not in print during those years.

Lin Carter's four paperback issues of Weird Tales were published from 1980 to 1983. The last issue came out in 1983. I don't have a copy of it, but I assume there was at least some awareness of an anniversary, for Carter reprinted Anthony M. Rud's story "Ooze," originally in the first issue of the magazine from sixty years before.

There were two issues of Weird Tales published by Bellerophon Network in 1984-1985. These, too, were aware of the history of Weird Tales magazine, but there isn't any overt anniversary content in their pages as far as I can see. (Thanks again to Brian Forbes for providing me with the contents of those two issues.) And now we're getting close to another revival of Weird Tales and the sixty-fifth-anniversary issue of Spring 1988. A couple of things came before that issue, though, and I'll write about those next.

To be continued . . .

Weird Tales #1 (1980), edited by Lin Carter, with cover art by Tom Barber.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Darkness at Noon

After writing the other day about weird webs and science fiction lines, I finished reading Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1941). In it, I came upon a word I had used in what I wrote: oceanic. I didn't go looking for it. It found me. In using the word oceanic, I was referring to a kind of loss of direction or location in time and space, a loss of boundaries that occurs when a person encounters weird, or becomes immersed or enmeshed in the uncanny, the supernatural, or any of the inexplicable things that may be found in our universe. Here is Koestler's explanation of oceanic:

And yet there were ways of approach to him. Sometimes he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the Pietà, or of certain scenes of his childhood. As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called "ecstasy" and saints "contemplation"; the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the "oceanic sense". And, indeed, one's personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The grain could no longer be localized in time and space. It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prisma of consciousness. (pp. 206-207)

Now I find that oceanic is a Freudian word and concept.

Darkness at Noon is about a man named Rubashov being held prisoner of a radical revolutionary regime--a Marxist and Stalinist regime--even though he is himself a radical revolutionary. I have written before about reason versus irrationality. One of the themes of Koestler's book is of that conflict. If reason is a primary quality of science fiction, and irrationality is a quality, if not a primary quality, of weird fiction, then this quote pertains:

When he had read that newspaper notice, then also alone in his cell, with joints still sore from the last bout of torturing, he had fallen into a queer state of exaltation--the "oceanic sense" had swept him away. Afterwards he had been ashamed of himself. The Party disapproved of such states. It called them petit-bourgeois mysticism, refuge in the ivory tower. It called them "escape from the task", "desertion of the class struggle". The "oceanic sense" was counter-revolutionary. [Emphasis added.] (p. 208)

I have written before, too, about how so much science fiction is progressive, that the basic philosophy behind it is in fact progressive. Progressivism, at least in science fiction, need not become political in nature, but it often does. So in political terms, progressivism, leftism, or Marxism is at odds with ecstatic, mystic, or oceanic states. (Another associated word in Darkness at Noon is romantic or romanticism.) Again: The "oceanic sense" was counter-revolutionary.

The paragraph following that quote reads:

     For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the earth. The Party taught one how to do it. The infinite was a politically suspect quantity, the "I" a suspect quality. The Party did not recognize its existence. The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.

Here are echoes of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924), also of Anthem by Ayn Rand (1938). But especially We: "The infinite was a politically suspect quantity" echoes the words of the female rebel against the United State, I-330, who says:

     "And why then do you think there is a last revolution? There is no last revolution, their number is infinite . . . . The 'last one' is a children's story. Children are afraid of the infinite, and it is necessary that children should not be frightened, so that they may sleep through the night." [Ellipses in the original.]

Contemplation of the infinite, then, evokes fear, fear is irrational, and as such must be tamped down, if not eliminated.

I-330's philosophical opponent, D-503, whom she is trying to seduce into rebellion, writes early on:

I feel my cheeks burn as I write this. To integrate the colossal, universal equation! To unbend the wild curve, to straighten it out to a tangent--to a straight line! For the United State is a straight line, a great, divine, precise, wise line, the wisest of lines!

Here are more of his words:

From beyond the Wall, from the infinite ocean of green there rose toward me an immense wave of roots, branches, flowers, leaves. It rose higher and higher; it seemed as though it would splash over me and that from a man, from the finest and most precise mechanism which I am, I would be transformed into . . . . But fortunately there was the Green Wall between me and that wild green sea. Oh, how great and divinely limiting is the wisdom of walls and bars! This Green Wall is I think the greatest invention ever conceived. Man ceased to be a wild animal the day he built the first wall; man ceased to be a wild man only on the day when the Green Wall was completed, when by this wall we isolated our machine-like, perfect world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds and beasts . . . .

Notice these words in their negative connotations, negative, that is, to a man caught in the passionate embrace of reason: ocean, wave, wild, sea, irrational.

So in the literature of dystopia and totalitarianism, lines and limits, gray, manmade structures of iron and concrete--even if they are prisons--appear to be both desirable and in opposition to the curved, the infinite, the wild, the green, the oceanic. (Leaves and seas are green.) Reason and logic are also desirable and also in opposition to the irrational. (Remember that D-503 is building a rocketship that will be used to "subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets.") Could there be the same oppositions in other types of genre fiction, such as in science fiction versus weird fiction?

Another long quote from Darkness at Noon:

     For forty years he had lived strictly in accordance with the vows of his order, the Party. He had held to the rules of logical calculation. He had burnt the remains of the old, illogical morality from his consciousness with the acid of reason. He had turned away from the temptations of the silent partner, and had fought against the "oceanic sense" with all his might. And where had it landed him? Premises of unimpeachable truth had led to a result which was completely absurd; Ivanov's and Gletkin's [both are party men] irrefutable deductions had taken him straight into the weird and ghostly game of the public trial. Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.

     Rubashov stared through the bars of the window at the patch of blue above the machine-gun tower. Looking back over his past, it seemed to him now that for forty years he had been running amuck--the running-amuck of pure reason. Perhaps it did not suit man to be completely freed from old bonds, from the steadying brakes of "Thou shalt not" and "Thou mayst not", and to be allowed to tear along straight towards the goal. (p. 209)

Again, notice the language: "logical calculation" and "the acid of reason" versus "illogical morality"; "[p]remises" and "irrefutable deductions" that lead "straight into"--i.e., along lines--to absurdities and "the weird and ghostly game of trial." The breaking of bonds, the shattering of traditional limits, the being "allowed to tear along straight towards the goal." And the realization:

Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.

Maybe it's better to remain within limits, for some things to remain unexplored and unknown, and for something other than logic and reason to be sometimes our guide.

* * *

In addition to We and Anthem, I see themes in common with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Koestler and Orwell knew each other. Orwell seems to have been the more decent of the two. In any case, I have a feeling he was influenced by Koestler and his novel. Both books are bleak and depressing. Both are about defeat at the hands of a powerful and ruthless State. In both, the assertion is put forth by the State and the Party that the ends justify the means. In both, the protagonist is imprisoned and tormented by a questioner, even if O'Brien is far worse than Gletkin in that role. And in both, the protagonist betrays his lover. By the way, this year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The year in which the novel takes place is now forty years past . . .

And now here we are again, engaged in a struggle. The political opposition is being jailed in America. Europe is still after what one of Koestler's characters referred to as "a certain wheat-growing province inhabited by a national minority." (p. 175) Throughout the West, there is censorship and enforced silence, also criminalized speech and criminalized thought. In our country, we have a party which seems to believe in its relentless quest for power that the ends always justify the means. That, too, is a theme in Darkness at Noon. Rubashov comments upon "the moral superiority of the victim." (p. 171) We have that in our country, too. It has gone so far that members of the religion of pieces, who are seen as the oppressed, are given intellectual license to murder those who are seen as their oppressors. The murdered were, after all, only Jews. And in America, too, a delusional young woman is counted among the victims of her own bloody massacre of helpless and innocent children in a school in Tennessee. The murdered were, after all, only children. They were, after all, only Christians. She was a victim, thus she was morally superior to them. If they were not oppressors, they were at least the children of oppressors at whom she might strike with her fully justifiable violence . . .

The parallels between Koestler's unnamed country--a country in the grip of Marxist revolutionaries--and our own could go on. A paradox, though: parallel lines may be lines but they may never meet, even when carried into infinitude . . .

To make an allusion to a different work and a different form of socialism, this summer our American Melakon machine-gunned our John Gill. He is now out of the way and she can seek after his power, prestige, and position. (Her name and Melakon's are almost anagrams of each other.) I have another pertinent quote from Darkness at Noon. I believe this is originally from the eighteenth-century French revolutionary Danton. It's fitting in its use of the feminine pronoun:

"Tyranny is afoot; she has torn her veil, she carries her head high, she strides over our dead bodies." (p. 204)

That's still a little excessive when it comes to our Melakon, but give her time, give her time.

We should remember that the impulse towards tyranny is in all of us. It becomes especially pronounced in some people, though, and too often they pursue political power so as to satisfy their impulses and to ameliorate their inner disquiet, for they cannot be happy until they stride over us and remake the world according to their own visions, even if that involves the murder of millions. If we want a better understanding of them, their impulses, and their visions, also their disquiets and inner torments, it's good to read books like Darkness at Noon and Nineteen Eighty-Four, We and Anthem, and on and on, into The True Believer and The Psychopathic God, book after book, account after account.

So begin.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

WT 50: A Tribute to Weird Tales (1974)

Leo Margulies published and Sam Moskowitz edited the fiftieth-anniversary issue of Weird Tales in the summer of 1973. Two more issues followed before the end of the year. The last of the four Margulies/Moskowitz issues was dated Summer 1974. Margulies was still credited as publisher. I wonder whether that issue was laid out and planned for publication in Spring 1974 before some kind of delay set in. Maybe that delay was for financial reasons, or maybe it was for legal reasons. (See the following paragraph for a possible explanation.) Maybe Weird Tales was reliving its difficulties of exactly fifty years before when there was so much uncertainty as to its future. Whatever might have happened, there would be no more "Unique Magazine" for the rest of the 1970s.

Also in 1974, Robert Weinberg edited and published WT50: A Tribute to Weird Tales. If you have never it, WT50 is a perfect-bound book of about 5-1/2 x 8-3/8 inches and 135 numbered pages. Inside are essays, five short stories, and artwork, all in black and white. Robert Weinberg introduced his book with an essay entitled "Why WT50?" And although it came along in the fifty-first year of Weird Tales, I think we can accept the title as accurate and expressive of Mr. Weinberg's intent. And the fact that he was publisher and holder of the copyright for this small book suggests pretty strongly that he took possession of the Weird Tales property either in late 1973 or during 1974. I should point out that he reused and adapted some of his material for The Weird Tales Story, published in 1977.

I haven't been writing at quite the pace I had hoped for during 2024. Merely by coincidence, this short article about the fiftieth anniversary of Weird Tales is my fiftieth of the year. I have another of my patented super-long articles coming up next, so be on the lookout for that and be sure to set aside some time for it.

WT50: A Tribute to Weird Tales, edited by Robert Weinberg and published in 1974, with cover art by John Mayer.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Fifty

I don't know what changed between the early sixties and the early seventies, but in 1973, publisher Leo Margulies put out four pulp-sized issues of Weird Tales edited by Sam Moskowitz. The first of those issues, dated Summer 1973, has cover art by Virgil Finlay. Also on the cover is a blurb inside a purple circle that reads:

50th

Anniversary

Issue,

1923-1973

Among the contents of the fiftieth-anniversary issue is an essay called "Fifty Years Young," written by Moskowitz and printed inside the front cover. The next two issues, from Fall 1973 and Winter 1973, have cover blurbs reading: "Fiftieth Anniversary Year." One more issue came along in Summer 1974, and then the fiftieth-anniversary issues of Weird Tales came to an end. In the early 1960s, Moskowitz is supposed to have warned Margulies against restarting Weird Tales as a magazine for fear he would lose his shirt. Maybe he did anyway in the 1970s.

On August 14, 2013, I wrote about the four issues of Weird Tales published in 1973-1974. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Born in 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, Leo Margulies died on the opposite end of the country, on the day after Christmas 1975 in Los Angeles, California. Either before he died or with the disposition of his estate, the Weird Tales property was transferred to Robert E. Weinberg (1946-2016). The late Mr. Weinberg proceeded to issue his own publication on the fiftieth anniversary of Weird Tales. That one comes next in this series.

Weird Tales, Summer 1973, with never-before-published art by Virgil Finlay, at least in full-color form and in this composition. But Finlay's illustration was a swipe, or a swipe of a swipe, or maybe some other kind of thing. You can read more about it in my article from April 28, 2017, here. 

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Forty

You could say that Weird Tales magazine had its first run from March 1923 to September 1954. You could also break up that first run, the most obvious break being from August to October 1924 when the business behind the magazine was reorganizing and there weren't any issues published at all. A better way of saying it is that Weird Tales was just trying to survive that summer and fall. Survive it did. Last year at around this time, Weird Tales observed its own 100th anniversary with a new issue. This time this year, we find ourselves in the one-hundred-year anniversary of the first hiatus and the almost-disappearance of "The Unique Magazine."

You could make other breaks, too, if you wanted to. In its first run, there came a break after twelve almost-monthly issues, published from March 1923 to April 1924, all with Edwin Baird as editor. Then came the first and only quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924 with Baird, or Farnsworth Wright and Baird, or Baird, Wright, and/or Otis Adelbert Kline as editor. Then came a three-month break, during which there could have been another quarterly issue published. Then, finally, in November 1924, there was a return, with Wright as newly promoted editor, a post he would hold for the next fifteen and a little more years.

There weren't any breaks during the Wright years, even if there were changes made along the way. Weird Tales was published continuously during that time, even after Dorothy McIlwraith took over in May 1940. Call that a break if you want. Finally, in September 1953, Weird Tales went from being pulp-sized to being digest-sized, another break if you like. The magazine survived exactly a year in that format.

Leo Margulies acquired the Weird Tales property after the magazine ceased publication. He held it for about twenty years, finally to sell it to Robert Weinberg in the early to mid 1970s. The story is that Margulies wanted to revive Weird Tales as a magazine in the early 1960s. And the story is that Sam Moskowitz talked him out of it for fear Margulies would lose his shirt. Nevertheless, several paperbound anthologies came out at around the fortieth-anniversary year of Weird Tales. All have introductions, either by Margulies or Moskowitz, as well as shorter introductions to individual stories. None of these books is explicitly an anniversary issue, even if all look back with fondness and nostalgia on the Weird Tales years. I think the 1960s and '70s were an age of nostalgia for the popular culture of the 1920s through the 1940s or so. The Weird Tales anthologies came out near the beginning of that age.

I have written before about three of the four Weird Tales anthologies of the early to mid 1960s. They were:

• The Unexpected edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, Feb. 1961, 160 pp.), with an introduction by Leo Margulies and eleven stories (Margulies called this "a usurer's dozen"), all from Weird Tales. Cover art by John Schoenherr.

• The Ghoul Keepers edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, Oct. 1961; 1965, 157 pp.), with an introduction by Leo Margulies and nine stories, all from Weird Tales. Cover art by John Schoenherr, recycled from The Unexpected.

• Weird Tales edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, May 1964, 155 pp.), with an introduction by Leo Margulies and eight stories, all from Weird Tales. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

• Worlds of Weird edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, Jan. 1965, 158 pp.), with an introduction, "The Forgotten Creator of Weird Tales, An Introduction . . ." by Sam Moskowitz and seven stories, all from Weird Tales. Cover art and interior illustrations by Virgil Finlay.

Pyramid Books issued two more anthologies at around that time, both edited by L. Sprague de Camp. These are in the same format as the Weird Tales anthologies, but not all of their stories were from "The Unique Magazine." These two books were:

• Swords & Sorcery edited by L. Sprague de Camp (Pyramid Books, Dec. 1963, 186 pp.), with an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp and eight stories, four of which were in Weird Tales. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

• The Spell of Seven edited by L. Sprague de Camp (Pyramid Books, June 1965, 192 pp.), with an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp and seven stories, two of which were in Weird Tales. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

One of these books is called Weird Tales. Another was published in 1963. Maybe together they make a fortieth-anniversary issue. Or take all six as an observance and celebration of forty years of Weird Tales. Finally, I should point out that Leo Margulies also reprinted stories from Weird Tales in his magazines of the 1960s, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine, in print from 1966 to 1968.

The Jove edition of Weird Tales, published in 1979, is a reprinting of the Pyramid edition of 1964 except that Robert E. Howard's story "Pigeons from Hell" was removed. Also, Virgil Finlay's cover illustration--a good one to be sure--was replaced with this iconic image by Margaret Brundage, originally on the cover of the magazine in October 1933. I'm not sure that any other image is more closely associated with Weird Tales than this one.

By the way, the Pretenders' song "Back on the Chain Gang" includes the lyric "Got in the house like a pigeon from hell." That sounds an awful like a reference to Howard's story. As much as some fans and readers might want themselves and their favorite fiction to be separated and isolated from the real world--as much as they might want to escape from the world--it can't be done. If you're going to think about and write about genre fiction, you have to face the world, its people, its history, and its culture.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Joy Connection

Two years ago, I wrote about Robert A. Heinlein and his book Starship Troopers (1959). Heinlein of course has had his great admirers and his great detractors. There seem to be a lot of words written particularly on Starship Troopers (1959). If you do a simple online search using the terms "Heinlein" and "fascist," you're sure to find plenty to read about him and his novel.

When I wrote in 2022, I referred to an interview with George Michael in which he referred to the group Joy Division as fascist. Actually it was a discussion on the BBC-TV show Eight Days a Week, and Morrissey was in on it, too. And actually the late Mr. Michael referred to what he called the "very fascist elements" of Joy Division's image. So he didn't really say that they were fascist. The host of the show was Robin Denselow. The original broadcast took place on May 25, 1984, now forty years gone and how sad. I guess this is life. Anyway, you can watch the discussion for yourself on your favorite video website.

Joy Division drew its name from the pages of a novel called House of Dolls, written by a pseudonymous author, Ka-Tsetnik 135633, and published in 1955. The reference is to brothels called Freudenabteilungen, or Joy Divisions, operated in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Joy Division's first album was an EP called An Ideal for Living. On the cover is a drawing of a Nazi Youth beating a drum. That's as much as I know about any connections the band may have had to the elements or imagery of Nazism or fascism. One more thing, Joy Division was previously called Warsaw. I bring this up on the 85th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland.

There was still something hanging out there after I wrote two years ago, for I soon remembered that after the death of Ian Curtis in 1980, Joy Division became New Order. I doubt that the creators of Star Wars have made any connections at all between their universe and the British music scene of the 1980s, but there is a New Order, as well as a First Order, in Star Wars. These are the bad guys. The First Order, from the most recent trilogy, look and act like Nazis in fact. We're supposed to think of them as Nazis and to associate them, I think, with a major political party in America. Whatever, Disney. Oddly, the name of the band New Order came from an article about--I assume--the Khmer Rouge. They were socialists, too, except that they were of the international variety. And like socialists tend to be, they were murderous, just like the Nazis.

There has been a lot of talk of "joy" these past couple of weeks. The other one of our major political parties found strength through joy at their recent national convention. I'm not sure that any insider at that convention or since has used the phrase "strength through joy" in regards to their party or their convention. Maybe I'm the one making connections here. But the phrase "strength through joy" also has Nazi origins. Kraft durch Freude, or Strength Through Joy, was an organization set up in 1933 to promote leisure, sports, travel, and so on in the new Nazi regime. It had lots of its own offices (or divisions), its own programs, too. I would hazard a guess that now, nearly eighty years after the destruction of the Nazi regime, the only remnant of Strength Through Joy is the Volkswagen Beetle. I know, it's weird. More on that in a minute.

But first, the connections go back to music. There was a band called Strength Through Joy.  They released a single called "Sheila from Chicago," backed with "She Said Goodbye," in 1982. (I think this is correct. I'm working with scant information. By the way, The Smiths had a single called "Sheila Take a Bow." I doubt she was the same Sheila. Another by the way: Morrissey had an album called Kill Uncle [1991], named for a movie that I mentioned recently in this space. Connections after connections, references after references.) There was a different band called Strength Through Joy. If you read about them, you will come across the phrase "The Force" and the words gothic, Holocaust, and KAPO. Is there any significance to any of these things? I don't know. In 1980, a Scottish band called Skids recorded an album and a song called "Strength Through Joy." The album sold with another of their albums, The Absolute Game. Their fourth album was called simply Joy.

The Nazi-era organization Kraft durch Freude, or KdF--again, Strength Through Joy--promoted the production and sale of a car it called the KdF-Wagen. That car eventually became the Volkswagen Beetle, the word Volkswagen meaning "People's Car." It's for the people, you know. Always for the people. Even when you kill the people, it's for the people.

Here's an interesting advertisement I found, from Cosmopolitan magazine, 1944. Someone else found it before I did and posted it on the Internet:

The caption begins: "A Dictator's Newest Dream--the 'People's Car'." The original idea is that the People's Car would seat two adults and three children. I guess four soldiers and a machine gun will do. By the way, you should read the bold print in the first column. I don't know about you, but I would prefer to "keep these rights" for myself.

Bob Newhart died last month, on July 18, 2024. He was ninety-four years old. He was a national treasure, I think, a very funny--a naturally funny--man with a great delivery and manner. On May 18, 1983, he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. There is a video of his appearance on that same website I alluded to before. I might as well provide a link. Click here to watch. At the 5:10 mark of that video, hear Bob, who was one-fourth German, talk about, in a German accent, the development of the Volkswagen. What are the holes in the side for? Ventilation. Those are for ventilation . . . and he continues. (I won't give away the punchline.) So did Bob Newhart see the Cosmopolitan ad from 1944? I doubt it. These thoughts come naturally to people who went through the war and those of us who grew up in its shadow and the shadow of what Nazis did to the world and its people. It's still hard to hear a German accent or German speech and not have your thoughts go in that direction. (Erica Jong's narrator feels that way in her novel Fear of Flying, from 1973.) It doesn't help that the whole continent seems to be going in that direction, too, and at a really rapid pace. As fast as lightning maybe?

The Volkswagen is literally "the people's car." During the Nazi era, it and Strength Through Joy were promoted through propaganda. So what other kind of car is promoted through propaganda? This kind of car:

When I say "this kind of car," I don't mean a BMW. (The B stands for Bavarian, by the way. There's some history there.) What I mean is the electric car, which is, like socialism in both its national and international forms, a scam and a folly and built upon the seizure of power by dangerous people and their useful idiots. But note the blurb: "Joy Electrified." (It needs a punctuation mark!) The car is powered--you might say it gets its strength--through electricity, and by driving an electric car, you will experience joy!

Here's an actual headline of an article written by Per Soderstrom and posted on the website Warp News on March 17, 2021 (link here):

"Electric cars for the people!"

Like the KdF-Wagen, the people's car, the car of which he wrote is inexpensive. I wonder if it has any holes in the side. You know, for ventilation.

A year and two months after "Electric cars for the people!" was posted, another electric car article appeared on the website of the Volkswagen Newsroom, this one was on May 20, 2022. Its title:

"Volkswagen joins forces with 'Obi-Wan Kenobi' for the launch of the new all-electric ID. Buzz"

Who knew there would be a connection between Star Wars and electric cars, let alone a Volkswagen? I guess that if you hook your electric car up to one of the biggest moneymakers in entertainment history, it can draw on its power. Or maybe its Force. Anyway, as always, if you follow any line long enough, it will make a circle.

Three years ago today, on September 1, 2021, I wrote about The Listeners by James Gunn. The events in that story transpire over many, many years. Some of them are from about our time, the early twenty-first century. The people of our time drive steam-powered cars in the late Mr. Gunn's book. When I read it, I thought that in that way he hadn't done a good job at prognostication. But then I realized that we have actually done something far more misguided than to return to steam. We have, in actuality, gone back to another old technology that we found more than a century ago to be inferior to the internal combustion engine. (At least steam engines run on combustion.) We gave up on it then in our great practicality and wisdom. Now we're going back. (I thought we weren't supposed to go back. I thought that--like Nazis and Bolsheviks--we were always supposed to go . . . Forward!) So I guess if there's one thing every science fiction writer should know, it's that people are so often stupid, foolish, ignorant, superstitious, also historically, scientifically, and I guess in every other way illiterate. It has always been this way and always will be. Getting into the future won't make us any better or smarter. We will always be human and always fallen.

The American political party that had its national convention recently wants to force people to buy and drive electric cars. And it wants all of us to pay for them. Remember the boldface print in the Cosmopolitan ad: "You can let a government decree when you shall do, what you shall buy, how much you shall pay." That's the first alternative. I like the second one better. (There's a third one, too. We chose that one in 1775.) The same questing after power is at work in the world now as when that ad was first printed. (The same Jew-hatred, too.) The former Great Britain--now Airstrip One--has descended pretty rapidly into tyranny in the past few years. British veterans of World War II must be wondering why they did what they did and why they even fought their war. What was the point if we were just going to give up everything to totalitarian regimes anyway? We in America may not be far behind the British. And if the lights go out here, what hope is there left for this world?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley