From Punk to Cyberpunk

Billy Idol was born on November 30, 1955. If he were an American, that would make him a Baby Boomer. Maybe that makes him a Boomer in his native country, too. Despite that, he belonged to a band called Generation X, or Gen X. Generation X was not named for Generation X, the truncated generation that came after the Baby Boom of 1946 to 1964. Instead the band was named for a book called Generation X by British journalists Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett, published in 1964, or the last year of the Baby Boom. Billy Idol was a fan of the Sex Pistols. They were all Boomers, too. The Sex Pistols were of course punk rockers. Generation X was a punk band, too.

Billy Idol is more well known for his solo career, which began in 1981. One of his songs was "Eyes Without a Face," released in 1984. The title is from the film of the same name, Les yeux sans visage in the original, which was released in 1960. That was during the Nouvelle Vague era of French cinema, but I'm not sure that it was in the mode of Nouvelle Vague. I have never seen Eyes Without a Face. It's considered a horror movie, but as we know, weird fiction is called horror because nobody knows what weird fiction is. Maybe Eyes Without a Face is actually a weird story. Anyway, the film is supposed to have been influenced by Jean Cocteau. Without knowing it, he lent his name to Cocteau Twins, who were not a punk band exactly but who were supposed to have been punk-influenced in their early days. Early on, music critics compared them to Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Bauhaus. Like the Thompson Twins, Cocteau Twins were not twins, there weren't two of them (after 1981), they weren't related, and none of them was named Cocteau (or Thompson). By the way, the Thompson Twins got their name from the comic strip Tintin. By the way, Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins collaborated with Harold Budd, about whom I wrote on February 4, 2021, here.

Billy Idol's sixth album was called Cyberpunk. It was released on June 28, 1993, so 33 years ago today. Since then, the earth has made as many trips around the sun as an LP makes around its spindle in a single minute, minus one-third. Cyberpunk is a concept album, but it was more than that at its release. Reading about it now leads me to think that it was a multifaceted and extremely complex project. But I have never heard it and don't remember its release. Cyberpunk was of course based on the culture of the same name from the 1980s and '90s, if there really was such a thing. William Gibson was a seminal figure in cyberpunk. There is a song on Cyberpunk called "Neuromancer." Cyberpunk wasn't very well received, I guess. I'm not sure that the real cyberpunks, if that was a term, would have recognized themselves or their culture in it. Whatever else might be true, you can't ding an artist for trying something really big and ambitious. If nothing else, Cyberpunk is a museum piece from the 1990s, a decade--the Generation X decade--that now, sadly, lies more than a quarter-century in the past.

So the first part of Billy Idol's career spanned from punk to cyberpunk.*

* * *

This entry is Wikipedia-ized research. It's a cheap kind of research, but oh well. It's better than AI research and better than AI writing. Anyway, Wikipedia has a list of supposedly cyberpunk films. One of them is Freejack, from 1992. One of the stars was Mick Jagger, who did not after all bail Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols out of jail in 1979. Freejack was based on Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley (1959). As it turns out, George Harrison watched an adaptation of Immortality, Inc. on British television in January 1969. I wrote about that encounter in this space on December 5, 2021. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Robert Sheckley was not explicitly a New Wave author, but he might have been closer to that movement than to the more positive science fiction of the Golden Age that preceded it. (If the Golden Age was like the Baby Boom, then maybe the New Wave was like Generation X.) Strangely, Sheckley lived on the Spanish island of Ibiza, which is where Sid Vicious lived as a child. They were there at two different times, but time travel would have allowed them to live there at the same time. Maybe the past is all one time all wrapped up together.

I have just completed two long series on the British New Wave in science fiction, punk music, New Wave music, and cyberpunk. This has been going on since April. I have written about William Gibson, author of Neuromancer (1984). I have also written about J.G. Ballard, who was a New Wave author. Now I have another connection among these various topics. From "An Interview with William Gibson," conducted by Larry McCaffery, at the following URL:

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/gibson_interview.html

[Larry McCaffery]: How consciously do you see yourself operating outside the mainstream of American SF?

[William Gibson]: A lot of what I've written so far is a conscious reaction to what I felt SF--especially American SF--had become by the time I started writing in the late '70s. In fact, I felt I was writing so far outside the mainstream that my highest goal was to become a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser [J.G.] Ballard.

And that will have to do for now. [Update: Except for one more coda and the following essay-length footnote.]

-----

A pre-publication update:

*Billy Idol was also the inspiration for the look of the original cyberpunk, Rayno in Bruce Bethke's story "Cyberpunk," published in Amazing Stories in November 1983. See "The Etymology of 'Cyberpunk'" by Bruce Bethke (1997). By the way, the editor of Amazing Stories at the time--the man who bought "Cyberpunk"--was George H. Scithers (1929-2010), later the co-editor of Weird Tales, from 1988 to 1990 and from 1998 to 2007.

In his forward to "Cyberpunk," from 1997, Mr. Bethke wrote:

IMPORTANT POINT! I never claimed to have invented cyberpunk fiction! That honor belongs primarily to William Gibson, whose 1984 novel, Neuromancer, was the real defining work of "The Movement." (At the time, Norman Spinrad argued that the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly Imitation Neuromancer.) [Boldface added.]

The reference appears to be to "The Neuromantics" by Norman Spinrad, published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in May 1986. Gardner Dozois was the editor. According to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:

[. . .] Spinrad argued cogently that the "romance" component of Gibson's triple-punning title Neuromancer ("neuro" as in nervous system; "necromancer"; "new romancer") is basic to the cyberpunk form. Spinrad proposed ingeniously that the cyberpunk authors should in fact be called "neuromantics" (nobody seems to have taken him up on this), for their fiction is "a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology." (Spinrad sees romanticism and science as having been damagingly split during the New Wave vs Hard SF [c.f.] debates of the 1960s; only with cyberpunk, he argues, did they fuse together again.)

That goes along with what I have been writing lately, but like I said before, there aren't very many original ideas left. Most of the time we just rework what others have written before us. Maybe that's what I have done regarding Norman Spinrad's essay from forty years ago. But I confess I have never read it. (In what I have written lately, I have not touched at all on the detective--specifically Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe--as a romantic hero--a knight errant--and an inspiration for later science fictions, but that idea has continued to occupy a spot in my little brain.)

Anyway, I have three more things:

First, Bruce Bethke (born in 1955, he is the same age as Billy Idol) is (or was) a musician. In his introduction to "Cyberpunk," George Scithers wrote: "His avocation is computer/electronic music." He is also a software developer, and so we have another example of the fusion of music and technology as in the British New Wave of the late 1970s and 1980s. (By the way, composer, pianist, electronic musician, and sound designer Suzanne Ciani was born 80 years ago this month--in Indiana no less--and so I would like to say happy birthday to her.)

Second, in reading the beginning of "Cyberpunk," I was reminded of the song "Slip Kid" by The Who, originally part of Pete Townshend's Lifehouse project--can we call that project an example of proto-cyberpunk?--less so of "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles.

Third, I just remembered that I wrote a dystopian/detective/computer-hacker science fiction story at around the same time that "Cyberpunk" and Neuromancer were published without having known about either one. Now I'll have to dig it out and read it again.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Seven

A Gothic Science Fiction

It has taken a lot of writing to get here, but my idea is that Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) is a Gothic or Romantic science fiction, also a science fiction of decadence rather than of ascent. Romanticism and Gothicism are about the past. Very often they are about decadence and descent, as in weird fiction. Both science fiction and weird fiction descended (no pun intended) in part from the Gothic and Romantic works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. But I think the Hugo Gernsback/John W. Campbell, Jr. type of science fiction is more nearly an innovation. It is, I think, a break with the past and is discontinuous with other types of genre fiction.

My idea is that Gothic or Romantic science fiction is an attempted return to the past, to a time before there were discontinuities in fiction or literature. Again, science fiction is an innovation. Rather than evolutionary, as conservative institutions are or tend to be, science fiction is more nearly revolutionary, as modern science is in the real world. In contrast, a Gothic or Romantic science fiction would appear reactionary. Reaction is one way of being conservative.

If there are spectra, then Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe are, in this interpretation, on the conservative side of the spectrum. Scholar Lee Sterrenburg opened his essay "Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein" (in The Endurance of "Frankenstein": Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, edited by George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher and published by the University of California Press, 1979) with what reads like a conclusion:

     Mary Shelley was the daughter of two of England's foremost intellectual radicals, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. For a number of reasons--not all of which can be considered here--she rejected her utopian and radical heritage and opted for a more conservative and pessimistic view of the world. [Boldface added.]

As for Poe, American conservative author and poet Peter Viereck considered him among our culturally conservative authors. I won't argue.

I have written on these topics before. Here are titles and links to three entries:

• "Pipe Dreams and Premonitions-Part Three" (Aug. 9, 2015)

• "Skilled Destroyers" (May 20, 2017)

• "Frankenstein: A Monster of Gothicism and Science" (Aug. 11, 2015)

The last of those entries was supposed to have been the lead-in to the current series on Neuromancer and William Gibson. Well, better late than never. Besides that, I have brought in a lot of topics that I would not have had I written in 2015. This series is better--though longer--for it, I think.

I imagine there are other authors of Gothic and Romantic science fiction. Maybe William Gibson took the lead. If there is a category of Gothic or Romantic science fiction, then maybe its authors are like the Pre-Raphaelites in British art, i.e., a somewhat conservative or reactionary movement, or an attempted return to the past, before change and innovation had set in. The paradox is that the Pre-Raphaelites were not evolutionary. I don't know whether they ever published a manifesto--maybe their official publication The Germ was it--but their movement was conscious and intellectual, and it had a set beginning. In a way, it was revolutionary, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, a year of revolution in Europe and the year in which Karl Marx issued his regrettable and disastrous Communist Manifesto.

By the way, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelites was William Morris. He was also a socialist, though utopian rather than "scientific" as in Marx's case. As we have seen, socialism is an essentially reactionary movement rather than an innovation, for socialists seek a restoration of the feudalistic past in which there are only two classes of men, the few on top and the very many below. They also of course seek complete stasis, as in the feudal ideal, with everyone fixed in his current status and no change permitted. In one sense, Nazis were more forward-looking and less reactionary than were their communist counterparts. One thing that Nazis and Bolsheviks shared is their hatred of the Jewish people. If you doubt that Marxism began with anti-semitism among its strains of thought, read what Marx had to say about Jews and the so-called "Jewish question" in the 1840s. (Why is there always a "Jewish question" but no equivalent questions regarding other groups?) Remember, too, that the worst villain in 1984 by George Orwell (completed in the centennial year of The Communist Manifesto) is named Emmanuel Goldstein and was undoubtedly based on Leon Trotsky.

In 1926 when the first issue of Amazing Stories was published, science fiction was an innovation. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, its various authors, artists, editors, and fans developed science fiction into a specific type--or two types, the hard science fiction type of Astounding Science-Fiction and what I guess you could call the adventurous or romantic science fiction or science fantasy of Planet Stories, Fantastic Adventures, etc. If there were two types, hard science fiction was the respectable one, at least in literary terms. It was or became the mainstream type. For example, in 1947, Robert A. Heinlein broke out of the pulps and into mainstream slick magazines with "The Green Hills of Earth," published in The Saturday Evening Post. (It's a story about music by the way.) Meanwhile, in 1947, the Shaver Mystery, a shabby chronicle based on the ravings of a real-life madman, was still the rage in Amazing Stories and related titles. Astounding Science Fiction started going the same way in May 1950 with the publication of "Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind" by L. Ron Hubbard. Maybe a process of decay had set in and the Golden Age of Science Fiction was thereby ended.

Pulp magazines faded in the 1950s. In 1960 came the question Is science fiction dying? (That same year, Astounding Science Fiction became Analog Science Fact & Fiction. Name changes in popular culture often indicate trouble.) I wonder whether the British New Wave of science fiction was the first sub-genre of the post-1950s or post-Golden Age. Cyberpunk followed the British New Wave. I wonder whether it was the second. Anyway, were New Wave and cyberpunk reactionary? If so, does that mean that they were or are conservative in some way? Were the authors of New Wave and cyberpunk in particular attempting a return to the past, to a time before the innovations of hard science fiction, before the innovation of science fiction itself, or even before the splitting of fiction or literature into recognizable and nameable genres and sub-genres? Finally, was that past Gothic or Romantic in its orientation, themes, and so on?

My idea is that Neuromancer by William Gibson and perhaps cyberpunk in general is a kind of decadent, Gothic or Romantic science fiction, oriented on the past and returning to the Gothic and Romantic origins of science fiction in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, among others, before genrification set in, and when there was still continuity in literature. Neuromancer was a new romance and the work of a new romancer, a phrase from Hugo Gernsback's introductory essay of 1926. Mr. Gibson was fully aware of Gernsback and his brand of science fiction, for before there was Neuromancer, there was his story "The Gernsback Continuum," from 1981, in which there is talk not only of Gernsbackian science fiction--illustrated by Frank R. Paul--but also of Nazis and what a character in the story refers to as "raygun Gothic."

Innovations and revolutions very often begin with a gnosis or a priori systems of thought, very often expressed in a manifesto. Manifestos are very often intellectualized works, or they are pseudo-intellectual, as in Hubbard's "Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind." (Again, if we're looking for an end date to the Golden Age of Science Fiction, we might set it to May 1950 when "Dianetics" was published.) They are often visionary and sometimes seemingly mad and full of fury. They are often angry, aggressive, incoherent, or inarticulate. Science fiction is a field in which a pre-action manifesto was put forth in Hugo Gernsback's essay "A New Sort of Magazine," published in Amazing Stories in April 1926. Gernsback afterwards enacted his ideas. Unlike with other manifestos and the actions based upon them, nobody died as a result. Karl Marx had his manifesto, too. It was the basis of what he called "scientific socialism." Countless millions have died as a result of that idea. Nice work, Marxists. Marxism in general has been a model and an inspiration for science fiction authors since then, for example, Isaac Asimov and his  concept of "future history." A more immediate manifesto in the arts was the Futurist manifesto of 1909 with its emphasis on speed, newness, youth, technology--and destruction of the past and all old things. Italian Futurism is supposed to have influenced Italian Fascism. If it did, that wouldn't be much of a surprise to me. We should always remember, by the way, that Mussolini was a socialist.

I have been writing about music in parallel to science fiction. Cyberpunk was obviously named after punk music and punk culture. Did punk have a manifesto? I don't know. A more interesting question is this: was punk an innovation, or was it a reaction? If Neuromancer is an example of cyberpunk; and cyberpunk is or was an attempted return to the past; and cyberpunk took after punk music and punk culture; did it then depart from punk by being a reaction? Or did it actually follow punk, which may have also been a reaction? If it followed punk, does that mean that punk was also an attempted return to the past, a kind of Pre-Raphaelite movement except that it was Pre-Beatle-ite? In British music of the 1970s and 1980s, there were punk, New Wave, Goth, and New Romantic strains or genres. (Bauhaus, a British goth band, was named for the revolutionary and futuristic Bauhaus movement in art and design, founded in--when else--1919. Bauhaus had its manifesto, too, written by Walter Gropius.) The same strains and genres seem to have been in science fiction. Nothing stands alone in the arts. Music and science fiction must have fed off of each other during the 1970s and '80s. And it all makes for the most fascinating of ideas and speculations.

I have a coda still to come, and now something else has come up, too, so I'll have another coda after that. In the meantime, I would like to say: Happy 100th Anniversary to Pulp Science Fiction and Happy 50th Anniversary to Punk Music!

Amazing Stories, September 1928. The framework of the mechanistic logo of Scientifiction must be a cross section from the inside of a spaceship, but it takes a shape approaching that of a Gothic arch, and the planet-and-star studded blue background looks like a wizard's hat. Maybe the gears driving the writing pen should include "ROMANCE" and "MYSTERY."

And speaking of Gothic arches, a Gothic arch is a negative space. The positive shape that might fill it is the rocketship standing on its launchpad, ready to blast off, or on the surface of a distant planet, already having arrived on a new world.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Amelia Calling

In "Reactions & Reactionaries-Part Two," from May 3, 2026, I  wrote:

By the way, earlier this year a British video game character named Amelia escaped from her creators to become a tempter of young men away from the State that wants to prevail over them. (If the society created by the overarching and controlling state is Eden, then let there be no Eve.) In that way, Amelia plays the same role as Julia in 1984, LUH 3417 in THX 1138 (1971), and I-330 in We (1924). There have since become German, Dutch, and other versions of Amelia. I wish them all success, even if they have faded from the news.

I have done some more thinking since then. Call the following an example of the Wikipedia-zation of research. Take the phone off the hook. This is going to take awhile.

Once Amelia escaped from her creators in January of this year, images of her proliferated on the Internet. These included videos, illustrations, and memes. In at least one of these images, Amelia wears a Joy Division t-shirt. I have written before about Joy Division and related topics. You can read what I wrote in the following two entries:

"Joy Connection" (Sept. 1, 2024)

"Joy Connection Revisited" (Nov. 13, 2025)

These have proved to be among the most popular of my postings in the past few years, if the number of visits to a posting is a measure of its popularity. I'm not sure why they are popular, but I like that they are. It's good to stick your finger in the eye of powerful people, including the entirely too powerful people who promote the cult of global warming. Maybe some of you like that idea, too. There will be more of that here, beginning in mere seconds and mere sentences.

I wonder about the significance of Amelia in her Joy Division t-shirt. I'm not British and never have been, but if I had to guess about any significance, it would be that there is something very British--if not uniquely British--about that group. If that's the case, then it's fitting (no pun intended) that Amelia the digital British rebel would wear the t-shirt of a uniquely British band. Maybe the t-shirt thoroughly identifies her as a Briton.

Another Amelia meme shows her lighting her cigarette from a flaming picture of the current prime minister, Keir Starmer. This was after a real-life woman, also in January, lit hers from a photo of the late Iranian leader, who proceeded in February to go up in flames. (Instead of a voodoo doll, hers was a voodoo photo.) Whenever I hear the prime minister's name, I think of Starker from the TV show Get Smart. But Mr. Starmer is no shtarker. On the contrary, he always seems to have a scared look on his face. He should have, for he's in over his head, I think. (He's more like a hapless No. 2 in The Prisoner. I hope there are plenty of prisoners on his island who continue to get his goat.) If he were an American, Two-tier Kier would be a Baby Boomer. Maybe he is in his native land, too. Like H.G. Wells, he's a Fabian socialist. As we know, there are only two kinds of socialists, the evil kind and the stupid kind. I don't think he's evil.

When I wrote about Joy Division in 2024, I made note of the fact that people have associated the group with fascism. I'm sure those same kinds of people will say that Amelia is also fascistic and that she is being used by fascists for their fascistic purposes. As we know, too, anything we disagree with is automatically fascist--no argument, debate, or analysis required. Amelia's wearing of a Joy Division t-shirt would seem to confirm her fascism.

Joy Division's first chart hit was "Love Will Tear Us Apart," which was released in June 1980, after lead singer Ian Curtis had killed himself the month before. If I interpret a quotation I found on Wikipedia correctly, drummer Stephen Morris said that the band was inspired in the composition of their song not only by Frank Sinatra and the American group Sparks but also by the song "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" by Sarah Brightman of all things. The video for "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was shot in a dark, decaying place. The video for "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" is bright and science-fictional. The reference in the title of the latter is of course to Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers, from 1959. People who see fascists everywhere, even under their own beds, believe that Heinlein was a fascist and Starship Troopers a really fascisticky book. This must be further evidence that Joy Division were fascistic. (1)

Joy Division is considered a post-punk or punk-inspired band. I can't go into punk music here. I don't know enough about it and there isn't enough space. I have already taken up enough in today's entry and will take up a lot more, as you will see. (I could split it, but I would like for all of what I write to be together.) But to me, punk is part anger, and it seems to me that it is descended in part from the Angry Young Men of 1950s British literature. I could be wrong about that. Let me know if I am and how I might better interpret these things. (2)

Keir Starmer was born in 1962, or about the time that the decade of the Angry Young Men ended and that of the unrelated or not-closely-related or maybe-closely-related decade of British New Wave science fiction began. Mr. Starmer seems weak and hesitant to me. Nonetheless, he seems to share in the Angry-Young-Man desire to tear down traditional British society and culture, only in a somewhat slow Fabian way rather than in a fast-motion radical way. He may not be capable of that himself, but he can import people who are, and that's probably good enough for him and his fellow-travelers. If his country falls after he dies--Mr. Starmer is an atheist after all--what does he care? Anyway, what he and people like him fail to understand is the same thing that the Mensheviks failed to understand about the Bolsheviks, which is that less ruthless people will forever fall prey to their more ruthless counterparts. Put another way, once the revolution is accomplished, the man-of-words- or man-of-ideas-type revolutionary is always the first to be stood up against the wall. The ruthless man-of-action-type revolutionary always wins out. The radical always shoots the comparative moderate. In this example, the Green will prevail in the Europeans' perceived Red-Green Alliance, and I don't mean Green of the radical environmentalist type, even if the two Greens are now forming alliances. (3)

Tearing down and overthrowing tradition is of course part of the socialistic or progressive program. But there are those who don't really care about building anything new in its place. Their anger and desire to destroy are everything that they have. Maybe some of the early punk rockers were like that. Angry people can tear down or undermine things in a fierce and angry way. They can also do it in a funny and angry way. The point is that prominent people who were once angry and destructive, or angry and funny, or angry and musically creative have since become what powerful people call fascists if only because they want to preserve their country for their own countrymen and culture. John Cleese appears to be in that category. So does Morrissey. I'm sure there are others. (4) J.K. Rowling isn't in the (extremely) angry or (at all) destructive category, but she has been called a fascist, too.

You don't have to be famous to be labeled a fascist, though. All you have to be is a lover of your own country and culture. (5) All you have to want is not to be deprived of your rights; to have your reputation or livelihood ruined; or to be oppressed, silenced, impoverished, imprisoned, attacked, molested, raped, stabbed, or murdered by the State or its imported myrmidons. If you were anti-establishment in 1976, you might have stomped on, torn up, or defaced the Union Jack. If you are anti-establishment fifty years later, you wave it. That or St. George's flag.

Maybe what we need is for great numbers of Americans continuously and systematically to discomfit, oppose, and offend the British government on behalf of its own people, whom it has silenced and subjugated, and who risk imprisonment just for speaking their minds--or the truth. (6)

We ought to overthrow those who want to overthrow everything--here, in the British Isles, in the rest of the English-speaking world--for the real revolution of the twenty-first century is against the revolutionaries who have finally reached the highest levels of power after so much striving. They used to be on the other side of things, or imagine that they were. Maybe they romanticized themselves that way. Maybe they were once angry young men, filled with punk-era fury. Now they seem tired, but not too tired to oppress the common people who disagree with them. I have read that we live in a post-democratic era in which the people get to vote, and yet their votes mean nothing. Any change cannot be permitted if the governing elite are to retain their power, prestige, and status.

Maybe what we need is a new punk music, a new punk culture, a new punk society, more powerfully anti-establishment than it was fifty years ago. Amelia is calling.

One last thing: Joy Division and New Order have finally made it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, such as it is. Their induction has been announced in the month that I write, April 2026, the same month in which King Charles III has made his happy visit to our shores. Joy Division was formed fifty years ago, in June 1976, so Happy Anniversary, Joy Division!

Notes
(Including two notes that are essays in themselves.)

(1) According to music journalist Jon Savage, Ian Curtis was interested in "romantic and science-fiction literature." One of the songs on the Joy Division album Closer (1980) is called "The Atrocity Exhibition" after J.G. Ballard's experimental novel of the same name published ten years before. Five of its chapters were first in New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock. The title story "The Atrocity Exhibition" was originally in New Worlds in September 1966, so sixty years ago. Mr. Moorcock's essay in that issue was "Why So Conservative?" That's an intriguing title, given today's topic. Unfortunately, I can't read it in any source available to me.

Anyway, on the other side of things, record producer Martin Hannett described the Joy Division sound as "dancing music with Gothic overtones." And now I think: could there have been a Gothic/science-fictional convergence in Anglo-American culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s? Could New Wave-type science fiction, with its Gothic, Romantic, or weird-fictional tone, themes, imagery, protagonists, and so on have been a forerunner to such a convergence? If there was such a convergence, it seems to have happened not only in literature but also in music. Whatever might have happened, a new sub-genre of science fiction emerged at that time. Named after a short story by Bruce Bethke (1983), exemplified by a novel by William Gibson (1984), and popularized by Gardner Dozois, it is of course cyberpunk, and so now we're back to punk music . . .

I have noticed how romantic much of the British music of the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s is, for example "Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)" by A Flock of Seagulls (1982), "Thieves Like Us" by New Order (1984), "Be Near Me" by ABC (1985), and "I Melt with You" by Modern English (1982), even if the last alludes to nuclear war. (In the video, singer Robbie Grey wears a Nazi-like hat. One of the members of Depeche Mode wears a similar hat in a video for "New Life.") Now I find that there was supposedly a reaction to punk music among musicians and singers called the New Romantics. (I try not to put much stock in what I have called genrefication, either in literature or music.) Their name echoes that of Mr. Gibson's Neuromancer, or vice versa. Spandau Ballet and Roxy Music are associated with the New Romantics. Like Joy Division, the name Spandau Ballet is connected to Nazis and concentration camps. Meanwhile, Bryan Ferry got himself into trouble talking about Nazis. Both he and Tony Hadley, lead singer of Spandau Ballet, are conservative. I guess all of that makes them fascistic, too.

I tell you, once you make a start in the Wikipedia-ziation of your research, you'll find that there is no end. And once you start calling people fascists, there's no end to that, either, because nobody is ever going to agree with you on everything, and like I said in a previous paragraph, anything we disagree with is automatically fascist.

(2) There are lots of confluences between punk music and things about which I have written lately, including 1976 as "year zero" in punk music, as well as anarchistic, nihilistic, leftist, and utopian strains in that music and culture. Remember that Michael Moorcock wrote an essay called "Starship Stormtroopers," dated 1977. If it had been a punk song instead of an essay on science fiction, "Starship Stormtroopers" would have come to us from Year One.

(3) At a march of the religion of pieces in East London late last year, a young leftwing British numbskull said to one of the marchers, "We're on the same side, bro." The man, dressed all in black, including a mask, replied, "No we're not," and marched on.

(4) I don't know anything about the politics of Pet Shop Boys, if they have any politics, but their song and video "West End Girls," from the mid-1980s, seem impossible now. That world from only forty years ago has disappeared as if it never existed. The video seems to have come from another planet. Any of the concerns of the pre-invasion 1980s--the concerns of British singers, musicians, and fans; of all of those East End boys and West End girls; moreover of every young Briton of the past, including of the punk scene--have been completely wiped away, displaced by new concerns, that is if young people are aware enough to have them, which is what Amelia and her appeal are all about, I think. Maybe the young people of today have been called to action against the betrayals of the older generations. And, yes, Boomers, you're among the older generations now, and, yes, many of you have betrayed young people in the worst way.

The music of the past is still young and new. The records and photos and videos from those times are like the figures on Keats' Grecian urn:

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

                For ever panting, and for ever young;

Ian Curtis and the voices and images of all who lived on will be "for ever young" and they will be forever for the young. In contrast, the image of pudgy leftist Boomer Anthony Albanese in a Joy Division t-shirt is comical, ironic, and cringe, all at the same time, especially considering that he is now powerful, now part of the establishment, now an oppressor. Amelia wears it much better. She may be made only of electrons, but she represents real human beings. She represents youth. For older people to wear youth like a costume is an offense. In the language of the left, it's an act of cultural appropriation. Wearing youth like a costume is an especial offense considering that the establishment is against youth, for it wants to take away young people's freedoms. In 1981, Triumph, a Canadian band, sang, in the voice of the listener, "I'm young now, I'm wild now, I want to be free." A half generation before, The Monkees, an American band, sang their part: "We must be what we're goin' to be/And what we have to be is free," and: "(In this generation)/We gotta be free." Both songs link youth to a yearning to be free. Young people will forever sing such songs, and too many older people will forever do their best to deny them. When you're a traitor to youth, you don't get to claim youth. Take off your Joy Division t-shirt. It's not for you. Once you begin oppressing, brutalizing, exploiting, mutilating, raping, and murdering babies, children, and young people, or once you countenance those things, you have given up on your youth. You have thrown it behind you in rags. You are undeserving of everything that rightfully belongs to the young.

By the way, some people describe Amelia as "goth." That fits in with what I have been writing about and will write about in terms of Gothic and Romantic reactions. Look for more of that in the series to follow.

Update: After I wrote this entry, above and below, the United Kingdom had its local elections. Labour was pretty much slaughtered. Amelia made another appearance a couple of days after that. In a video, she has Prime Minister Shtarker dressed up like a British schoolgirl and delivers him to the type of men who have preyed upon British schoolgirls for many years now, the same type of men who are protected--if not encouraged in their predations--by the British establishment at its various levels. I don't like AI anything, but sometimes it can be useful.

I write these things and Americans talk about them not because we are against the British people but because we are for them. They--you--have given us so much and have so much more to offer the world, not least of which is your music. We do not wish you to be destroyed or for you to destroy yourselves. We want you to turn back another invasion from the Continent. We want you not to make a shameful conquest of yourselves. We want your history, culture, and nation to be preserved and to thrive. We want you here with us instead of our standing alone in the world. We want you not to become Airstrip One or a new caliphate.

(5) If you think that culture is a Nazi codeword, please get a grip, and I don't mean on your revolver.

(6) Update: Now I find that the U.S. government is setting up a website for just that purpose. We'll see how it goes.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

100 Years of Amazing Stories

In April 1926, H.P. Lovecraft returned from Brooklyn to his Providence home. In New York, he had been an outsider. Once in Rhode Island again, he was an insider, at least in his own life and his own home. Weird Tales published "The Outsider" in its issue of April 1926. Lovecraft could easily have read it on his train ride home. If he had, would he have seen any irony in his situation? After all, he had gone out into the world, just like his narrator, and now he was on his way home again. Except that he was happy.

I have written before about "The Outsider." I wrote then about Frankenstein's monster and Kaspar Hauser, two other outsiders who only wanted to be in. But they never could be. And now I think that Grendel could have been an outsider made bitter and murderous by his awareness of his situation. He was a march-stepper, a wanderer along borderlands, like Lovecraft. Could he have once seen himself in a mirror? Could that have driven him away to lurk in fen and fastness? Probably not, for Grendel was not a modern man.*

Lovecraft could have read another magazine on the way home that spring. That one was the first issue of Amazing Stories, published in New York City by Hugo Gernsback. Weird Tales is supposed to have been the first American magazine devoted entirely to fantasy fiction. I'm not sure that that's true. It would take a lot of reading through the first thirty issues of the magazine, published from March 1923 to March 1926, to find out whether it is so. But we can be sure that the first issue of Amazing Stories was full of fantasy and nothing else. It was the first fully science-fictional magazine in America. I wonder if Lovecraft read it at all. He must have. But how early in its history of publication?

Here are the contents of Amazing Stories #1, adapted from the Speculative Fiction Database:

• "A New Sort of Magazine," editorial by Hugo Gernsback
• "Off on a Comet, or Hector Servadac," part one of a two-part serial by Jules Verne (1877)
• "The New Accelerator" by H. G. Wells (1901)
• "The Man from the Atom" by G. Peyton Wertenbaker (1923)
• "The Thing from -- 'Outside'" by George Allan England (1923)
• "The Man Who Saved the Earth" by Austin Hall (1919)
• "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)

All of these stories were reprints. Wells, Hall, and Poe also had stories in Weird Tales. Note that Hall's story is of "The Man Who . . ." type, while England's is of "The Thing . . ." type. England's story is also about "the outside," just as Lovecraft's story in Weird Tales that month was. I'm sure his was a different type of outside. The cover art and three interior illustrations of that inaugural issue were by Frank R. Paul. F.S. Hynd illustrated Poe's story.

Amazing Stories is still around, although it isn't currently in print but only on line. Unfortunately, it allows its contributors to use AI tools in the writing of their stories. I don't have to tell you that I hate AI in writing and art. Even so, I'll say: 

Happy 100th Anniversary to Amazing Stories!

-----

*There is another outsider who looks in on and raids the celebrations of men. He is the Grinch. Could his name and Grendel's have come from the same root? Most obviously: grin, from the Old English grennian, "to show the teeth (in pain or anger)," or the Old Norse grenja, "to howl."

Amazing Stories, April 1926, with cover art by Frank R. Paul. Those are skaters, I presume on one of the moons of Saturn. Have they arrived on sailing ships? Update (Apr. 2, 2026): Good old me, comment below, has pointed out that the illustration is for "Off on a Comet, or Hector Servadac" by Jules Verne. Thank you, Good old me.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales and the American Revolution

On July 4, 2026, the United States of America will reach its 250th anniversary. A century ago, in our sesquicentennial year of 1926, Weird Tales magazine was in its third and fourth years in print. I haven't found anything yet by which the publisher and editor acknowledged the sesquicentennial. I'm not sure that I will. I also haven't found and can't think of any weird tale set during the Revolutionary War or with the war as its backdrop. I admit that my title above is misleading. At least it's not clickbait.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the earliest American author to have appeared in Weird Tales. Born during the final year of the Revolutionary War, he died seventeen months before the Civil War commenced. His lifetime, then, stretched between two of our foundational wars. It's possible to think of American history as a fabric held up by the tentpoles of war. Irving's life might illustrate that idea. Another example, and a minor one to be sure: Weird Tales magazine was founded after the Great War had ended and possibly only because there had been a war. The great era of Weird Tales--if we can call it that--ended before the Second World War began, or at least no later than in the course of that war. Like so much American greatness, this one came in an interbellum period.

Weird Tales reprinted four of Irving's stories, the last being "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (Nov. 1928). When I said that I can't think of a weird tale that has the Revolution as its backdrop, that's not quite true. After all, the Headless Horseman is rumored to be the ghost of a Hessian soldier, while a stream in a haunted place in Irving's story flows by the tulip-tree where Major André was captured by three Americans in 1780. The American Revolution also figures in "Rip Van Winkle," which can also be called a fantasy or a weird tale. As for a weird tale of the Revolution written in later years, especially in the twentieth century, I can't think of a one.

The Civil War is closer to us in every way. Years ago I met a hog farmer in southeastern Indiana whose grandfather was a twelve-year-old boy when Morgan's Raiders came around and stole some horses from his father's barn. Only two generations separated that hog farmer from the war. Only one more separated me from him. On another farm not far away, a widow in her nineties told me that there were supposed to have been graves on a point of land above the forks of a ravine where escaped slaves had been buried. I looked where she asked me to look. Did I see, or did I only make myself see, several grave-sized areas of sunken soil on that point? Although I have an ancestor who served in the Revolutionary War--his name was William Hall--I have nothing comparable to tell about it. It really was so very long ago, closer to the English Renaissance and William Shakespeare's time than it is to our own.

I can think right away of a weird tale set during the Civil War. It's called "The Valley Was Still," and it was written by Manly Wade Wellman. Weird Tales published Wellman's story its issue of August 1939, the month before another war began. "The Valley Was Still" was adapted to film in an episode of The Twilight Zone. It was broadcast in November 1961, one hundred years and a few months after the war began. Ambrose Bierce wrote stories about the Civil War. So did Jack Matthews. Some of these are straight war stories. Others, such as Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," have certain weird elements or show the influence of weird in our lives. I recently read some of the late Mr. Matthews' stories in his collection Tales of the Ohio Land (1978). Like H.P. Lovecraft and Washington Irving, Jack Matthews had a well-developed sense of place. I have been to some of the places about which he wrote. The author Fitz-James O'Brien was killed in the Civil War. Both he and Bierce had stories reprinted in Weird Tales.

Men in Revolutionary times wore breeches and stockings, gorgets and ruffles, tricorn hats and even wigs. Although they had long rifles, most carried muskets--all were muzzleloaders. The men who fought the Civil War wore trousers and kepis and fired factory-made rifles, some of which were breechloaders, as well as the first machine guns. They went up in balloons, rode on railroad trains, and communicated by telegraph. We have photographs of them in camp and in the aftermath of their battles with each other. We have images of their fresh corpses. These have immediacy and tragedy that no engraving or drawing of the eighteenth century can match. Although there weren't any movie cameras just yet, watching The General--released on New Year's Eve 1926 and starring Buster Keaton--is like opening a window into the past, a really astonishing experience when you get down to it. As we watch, it's hard to believe that we are not in fact seeing film footage from 1862. When that movie was made, there were countless thousands still living who vividly remembered the war and its events. That was only one hundred years ago. There are people still living who were alive then.

I can propose an explanation as to a lack of weird fiction set during the Revolutionary War or with the war as its backdrop. It goes something like this: the American Revolution occurred during the Age of Reason and before the Romantic Era and the return of weird. Weird, or wyrd, faded as a word and a concept during the middle centuries of the second millennium, only to return during the Romantic Era. For example, the earliest use in verse of the noun weird that I have found is in Robert Burns' poem "Her Answer," from 1795. That was of course after the Revolutionary period had ended. Less significant, I think, but still worth considering is that Americans during the Revolution were less literate as a whole than in later eras (two of the three men who captured Major André could not read), and there wasn't much of a popular press and almost no fiction.

But that doesn't explain why later writers would not have written weird fiction about the Revolutionary War. Or if there is any, maybe I just haven't found it yet.

I should add that, although Gothic fiction got its start in the decade before the Revolutionary War, it may not have traveled very well to America. And although one of our earliest authors, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), wrote Gothic works, his were all published after the Revolutionary period, and, as far as I know, none has the Revolution as its backdrop.

In contrast to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War occurred after Romanticism had swept through western culture. The men and women of the 1860s would have been immersed in it, I think, even if it had by then decayed into a kind of sentimentalism. Weird was present nonetheless, and it was approaching a high period, if there was such a thing. If there was such a thing, maybe the high period of weird fiction ran from the 1870s or '80s until the 1930s or '40s (for a total of threescore and ten years?). And maybe world war brought that period to an end as well. Anyway, I don't sense any Romanticism or sentimentalism in the Revolutionary War. The American Revolution instead seems to have been a sober, serious, practical, and realistic matter, even if it was underlain by and fought for the highest ideals. Maybe that's why it worked so well and continues to do so now, 250 years later.

There is a recently released documentary series on the American Revolution available on pay TV. It was made by a man who gained fame--justly--for his previous series on the Civil War. Again, the Civil War is closer to us and more immediate. It would prove difficult, if not impossible, to treat the American Revolution with the same kind of effectiveness. It would be hard to evoke the same kinds of feelings in the viewer that that long-ago series on the Civil War did. But I also think that no one is really up to this task anymore. The minds of the documentary makers and too many of their experts have been taken over by small ideas and their thoughts misdirected by erroneous belief systems. And as the last episode of that series--specifically a quote: "No one is above the law"--demonstrates, their minds have also been taken over by a peculiar brand of derangement that does them no good at all and in fact causes them great harm. I hope they and the rest of the world will soon get over it, if only for their own sake.

I'll add one more thought, because I can't think of anywhere else it might go right now: one of the outgrowths of the American Revolution is our Bill of Rights. Among our rights is the right to speak freely. That right is enshrined in the First Amendment. Enshrined in the Second is a guarantee for all of the others. Non-Americans and anti-Americans harp on our keeping and bearing of arms. What they fail to understand is that we have guns because the only language that tyrants seem to understand is the sound of lead flying in their direction. Our nation began in violence because violence is very often necessary if human beings are to gain or keep their rights and their freedoms. In foreign nations of the past and today, the people are disarmed so that they might be made powerless before their governments. It's easy to take away the rights of people who can't fight back. That's happening apace in the world, including or most especially in the English-speaking world, which is where the modern concept of liberty was born. We in America don't want violence. We want peace. But we also want to be free. Too often, violence is forced upon us because there are those who will always seek to deprive us of our freedoms. That is as true here as anywhere. And so we have the fabric of our history held up, as I have said, by the tentpoles of war. The expression is that the United States of America is the Empire of Liberty. As such, we will continue and forever oppose the empires of tyranny. So I will say, exactly half a year early, Happy Birthday, America!

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales in 1926

Happy New Year!

Twenty-six doesn't have the ring of twenty-five. For being an even number, it's kind of odd. But in 2026, we will celebrate 250 years since we declared our independence from an Old World tyranny. Although Old World brands of tyranny still threaten us, they threaten more the common, ordinary people of Europe, many of whom are being made into subjects rather than being allowed to remain citizens. Those brands are certain to keep coming back. We will be certain to keep knocking them down. Sometimes this is a deadly activity, as it was in 1917-1918 and 1941-1945. Other times it's fun. For example, the U.S. government recently denied visas to five supreme European censors and scolds. They and their governments stamped their tiny feet in response. Let them stamp. And let's hope this remains fun. Let's hope that the fullest freedoms will soon march unimpeded down the avenues of Europe.

In 1926, America celebrated its sesquicentennial, including at the world's fair in Philadelphia. That doesn't seem to have turned out very well. Our bicentennial celebration in 1976 was much better and more memorable, I think. I remember it at least, including images of the tall ships in New York Harbor, many of which came from our friends in Europe. You can still find bicentennial books and collectibles at secondhand stores. I don't think I have ever seen a collectible or book about the American sesquicentennial.

In 1926, Weird Tales magazine turned three years old. It was the second full year of the magazine, as well as the second full year with Farnsworth Wright as editor. I doubt that the sesquicentennial was on the minds of the publisher, editor, staff, writers, and readers of "The Unique Magazine." At least I haven't found any evidence that it was.

Weird Tales is supposed to have been the first American magazine devoted exclusively to fantastic fiction. But was it really? Part of the problem with this idea is that most people don't really know what weird fiction is. They don't seem to know that weird fiction is not necessarily the same as fantasy or horror. Weird fiction is, I think, its own separate sub-genre. There need not be a fantastic or supernatural element in a work of weird fiction. There should be, however, a weird element. It's not weird if it doesn't have weird.

I haven't read every issue of Weird Tales in the period beginning in March 1923 and ending in March 1926. (The month of March is important for a reason. We'll get to that in a minute.) What I can say is that not every story in the issues that I have read is a tale of fantasy, pseudoscience, or supernatural horror. Without reading further, I can't say which issue, if any, was the very first devoted exclusively to fantasy during that three-year period. However . . .

In April 1926, a new magazine appeared on newsstands in America. Although it had its predecessors, it was "a new sort of magazine." That was in fact the title of the opening essay of Amazing Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback. There were only six stories in that inaugural issue. All were reprints, but all were fantastic. Until we know something different, Amazing Stories will have to remain as a candidate for the first American magazine devoted exclusively to fantastic fiction.

By the way, the first several issues of Amazing Stories were made up of all reprints. One of those was "The Malignant Entity" by Otis Adelbert Kline, originally in Weird Tales in May/June/July 1924.

Something else big happened in April 1926. That was the month in which H.P. Lovecraft returned to Providence after two years of marriage and life in New York City. The exact date was April 17, 1926. Later that year, in the summer in fact, Lovecraft wrote "The Call of Cthulhu," which was published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. And another something else big happened in regards to Lovecraft when Weird Tales published his story "The Outsider" in its issue of April 1926.

August Derleth made his debut in the pages of "The Unique Magazine" in May 1926. His story was "Bat's Belfry." He had just turned sixteen years old when it appeared. Perhaps he submitted it at the age of fifteen, thereby making of himself a prodigy. In July 1926, Bassett Morgan had her first story in Weird Tales. She was a popular but not a prolific author. She lived to see the American bicentennial. In August 1926, "The Woman of the Wood" by A. Merritt was published. It proved to be the most popular story in Weird Tales in the period 1924 to 1938. Edmond Hamilton had his first story in Weird Tales in that same August issue. His was entitled "The Monster-God of Mamurth." In September 1926, Everil Worrell made her debut with "The Bird of Space."

Harry Houdini died on October 31, 1926. He had contributed to Weird Tales as it struggled through the first half of 1924. Cleveland Moffett, who was in a later incarnation of Weird Tales, had preceded him in death, on October 14. Marietta Hawley, aka "Josiah Allen's Wife," died on March 1, 1926. Her poem "The Haunted Castle" was printed posthumously in Weird Tales.

Richard Matheson, Anne McCaffrey, Roger Corman, J.O. Jeppson, Frank M. Robinson, Jeffrey Hunter, and Poul Anderson were born in 1926. Only the late Mr. Matheson was in Weird Tales.

Also in 1926, The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs was published in book form, combining his Moon trilogy of "The Moon Maid" (1923), "The Moon Men" (1925), and "The Red Hawk" (1925). None of those stories was in Weird Tales, but knowing that didn't stop me from writing about them awhile back. The year 2026 is in the Moon trilogy: it's the year that Julian 5th and his crew land on the Moon. As it turns out, the middle book of the trilogy is about a future dystopia in which the Moon Men rule over the people of Earth. Julian 6th, who keeps as a piece of contraband an American flag, leads a revolt against the Moon Men. Unfortunately it fails. Nonetheless, "The Moon Men" is a pro-American and patriotic work. Larger than that, it is pro-human and pro-freedom. Burroughs hardly seems to have been capable of it, but he wrote a visionary work. Writing more than one hundred years ago, he looked ahead to our time, the current year, and in some ways our current situation. Flags and the flying of flags have become controversial, not only in the United States but also in Europe. People should be able to fly the American flag, the Pine Tree Flag, the Gadsden Flag, and, in the United Kingdom, the Union Jack without fear of disapproval and vilification by their own governments and scolds in the mainstream media. But that isn't always true today.

This year I will write about Weird Tales and its authors of 1926, but I also plan to write about other things, including meeting some requests, returning to some unfinished series from the past, and completing some entries that have lingered in draft form for months and years. I invite you to remain, to read and learn, if I have anything to teach you, and to leave comments in the space below. Welcome to the sixteenth calendar year of my blog.

A poster for the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, June 1 to December 1, 1926. Art by Dan Smith (1865-1934). Published by Elliot Brewer. The half-clad woman in this image would seem to be Liberty. Referred to in the caption as "The Voice of the Liberty Bell," she seems to be emerging from the bell as from a cornucopia, bearing the Stars and Stripes and shedding stars as she emerges like a new constellation. The clock in the bell tower of Independence Hall reads 5:12 or thereabouts. I like to think that I'm up on my knowledge of the American Revolution, but I can't think of any significance as to the time. I guess it had to read one time or another, but I'm always on the lookout for secret and hidden meanings in things. 

Citation: "The Sesquicentennial International Exposition, Philadelphia," Smith, Dan, 1926, Library Broadside Collection, 34463, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Tennessee Virtual Archive, https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/broadsides/id/36, accessed 2025-12-27.

Text and caption copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Spear and Fang

100 Years of Robert E. Howard in Weird Tales

No discussion of the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales would be complete without mentioning "Spear and Fang," the first story by Robert E. Howard published in "The Unique Magazine."

Howard was nineteen and a half years old when "Spear and Fang" was published. Because my books are in storage, I will have to rely on online sources of information on Howard and his career to write this. Those sources indicate that "Spear and Fang" was not Howard's first published story but suggest that it was his first professional sale. According to one source, which is always suspect, even on the most well-documented of facts, Howard submitted "Spear and Fang" to Weird Tales in 1924, when he was just eighteen. The new editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright, accepted it and informed Howard as much at Thanksgiving time in 1924. I wonder if that means that Howard submitted his story while Weird Tales was still in hiatus, from about June or July to November 1924. If so, that would make for the most serendipitous of developments for Howard, Wright, and Weird Tales, all three, for the then teen-aged author would prove to be one of the most popular and prolific of those who contributed to a magazine that had almost disappeared in 1924. For his efforts, Howard was paid $16, a nice sum for a beginning pulp author of the 1920s.

"Spear and Fang" is a caveman story, though not the first to appear in Weird Tales. That honor goes to R.T.M. Scott and his "Nimba the Cave Girl" from March 1923. It's not very long, five printed pages in all, but it tells a complete story, essentially of a love triangle, if you can call it that, or the eternal triangle, and the rescuing of a damsel in distress.

"Spear and Fang" is, on its surface, a conventional story, but I noticed some things in my reading of it that I think are worth writing about. First, Howard was well known in his later writings for his identification with barbarians and what some people would call savages. That isn't the case with "Spear and Fang," for the hero is a more advanced Cro-Magnon man, while the villain is a primitive, even bestial, Neanderthal man. It's clear that the Cro-Magnon man, called Ga-Nor, is more civilized. He is, after all, an artist. (More on that in a minute.) He is the man of the future. Both he and A-aea, the woman he rescues, are referred to as "mark[s] of progress." The Neanderthal man, on the other hand, is the man of the past. His days are numbered, even if he still has the power to terrify his enemies. It seems to me that at age eighteen Howard still believed in the idea of progress. This was, after all, a progressive era, even if that era was nearing its end and even if Calvin Coolidge, a conservative, was then president. We should remember, too, that, even if weird fiction is at its heart a conservative or anti-progressive genre, Weird Tales was co-founded by a man, J.C. Henneberger, who had worked for a progressive and prohibitionist newspaper. I would guess that many of the magazine's authors held progressive views, too, including unsavory ones such as eugenics.

Second, there is a racial aspect in "Spear and Fang," though not in the way people now talk about race. The idea expressed in Howard's story seems older and broader, maybe more like an old Anglo-Saxon or even biblical view, expressed pretty well in this sentence:

     Both the girl and the youth were perfect specimens of the great Cro-Magnon race which came from no man knows where and announced and enforced their supremacy over beast and beast-man.

Just as we shouldn't interpret "race" in our contemporary terms, we also shouldn't interpret "supremacy" in those terms. I wonder if Howard thought of the original Cro-Magnon men as being racially pure and that only afterwards was there some kind of degradation or descent: in our pre-civilized state, we were "perfect," or at least near perfection, and only later did decadence set in. I wonder if ideas like those were related in any way to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Maybe those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau are at work here, too.

Third, Howard probably catches a lot of flak now for his depictions of women. I don't have anything to say about that. I'll just point out that, although A-aea needs rescuing, she is not a passive character. In fact, she risks disapproval and punishment for going after what she wants, which is to draw the attention of Ga-Nor, the man she loves.

Finally, Ga-Nor, like I said, is an artist, even if he is tall and well built. (That's not a knock at artists. I'm one after all.) I take him to be a stand-in for the author of the story. He seems oblivious to A-aea at first. He's more caught up in his creation of a cave painting. But when she needs rescuing, he's there, and he succeeds where his taller and stronger rival, the reckless, cruel, and proud Ka-nanu, fails. Call it a revenge of the nerds and the fantasy of creative, gentle, or less than adept men when it comes to winning the hearts of beautiful women. This is what so much pulp fiction is about.

Although "Spear and Fang" was written by a teen-aged author (before teenager was a word), it shows some unusual depth and complexity, I think, and is more than a mere tale. It shows that there were larger things behind Howard's writing, larger than just a desire to tell a story or to earn some income. Howard seems to have begun forming a worldview and a foundation for his later writings. And he was just seven years away from "Worms of the Earth" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1932), which can be called one of his masterpieces, if there is such a thing as a masterpiece in pulp fiction.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Great Gatsby

I have been writing about the Weird Tales of one hundred years ago. In February, I wrote about The New Yorker at one hundred and its pretty tenuous connections to "The Unique Magazine." The Daily Cartoonist noticed. D.D. Degg wrote an article called "Reports: The New Yorker at 100" for that website and closed his or her article with mention of my own. You can find "Reports: The New Yorker at 100" by clicking here. I did not find until today an article in The New Yorker about H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. That one is called "The Complicated Friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, One of His Biggest Fans." The author is Paul La Farge, and his article was published in The New Yorker on March 9, 2017.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was also published one hundred years ago. The date was April 10, 1925, and so the anniversary came last week. Although it arrived on the scene a century ago, The Great Gatsby is closer to us than it was to anything published one hundred years before it. Fitzgerald's short novel is still very modern. It could almost take place today. There are obsessions with money and status. Advertising, in the form of a billboard, figures pretty prominently. There is also a lot of driving in The Great Gatsby, and in fact the plot turns upon an automobile accident. There is also of course violence. This is after all an American novel and a novel of America. Near the end, the body of a murdered Gatsby is found in a swimming pool, like that of William Holden's character in Sunset Boulevard (1950).

I don't think of F. Scott Fitzgerald at all as an author of genre works, but there is an entry on him in The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. In 1991, Robert Hale, a British firm, published The Fantasy and Mystery Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Its contents:

• Introduction by Peter Haining
• "Tarquin of Cheapside" (1921)
• "His Russet Witch" (originally "O Russet Witch!" 1922)
• "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (1922)
• "The Dance" (1926)
• "A Short Trip Home" (1927)
• "Outside the Cabinet-Maker's" (originally "Outside the Cabinet-Makers" 1928)
• "The Fiend" (1935)

Early on, The Great Gatsby did not sell well. Its readership increased greatly after October 1945 when it was published as an Armed Services Editions. And now H.P. Lovecraft comes up again, for the publishers of Armed Services Editions also issued The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales in June 1945. That was the first of the series with the word weird in the title. The second was The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen, from December 1945. Other tellers of weird tales who were published include Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, H.G. Wells, Edison Marshall, Robert W. Chambers, and Wilbur Daniel Steele. By the way, The Great Gatsby was adapted to television in 1955 as an episode of Robert Montgomery Presents, with Robert Montgomery, Phyllis Kirk, and Lee Bowman. That episode was directed by Alvin Sapinsley, who also directed the first television adaptation of a story by H.P. Lovecraft, "Pickman's Model," broadcast on December 1, 1971, as an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery.

Fitzgerald is supposed to have been influenced by Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather in the writing of his novel. There are similarities between The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia (1918), specifically in the first-person narration of a friend of the title character in observation and praise of him or her. My Ántonia is set in the American West, a place far from Europe and depicted as clean and pure. It is also a positive and loving story. The Great Gatsby, of course, is set in the East, a place about as close as you can get to Europe and still be in the United States. That place is shown as being corrupt and even decadent, and the story itself is tragic. But this is an American kind of corruption, I think, based as it is on money, status, and self-improvement. Curiously, the main characters in The Great Gatsby are from the Midwest and the Plains, Gatsby himself from North Dakota, just two states (or one and half) away from the Nebraska of My Ántonia. They remind me of the characters in Seinfeld. (It's fitting that that series ended with all of them sitting in a jail cell.) Gatsby more than any of them is perhaps admirable. As for further similarities between The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia, you can decide for yourself whether one or both have homoerotic undertones. 

Jay Gatsby is like a weird-fictional character in that he oversteps his bounds and pays the price for doing so. Some of those bounds are of himself. Others are of the society, culture, and nation in which he lives. Gatsby may be called great, but he isn't a hero. Maybe after the Great War (which also wasn't great) and all of its devastations, there were no more heroes--or at least very few--in mainstream fiction. I would have to think on that for a while. But there were still heroes in genre fiction, in Westerns, crime and detective stories, and soon-to-be science fiction. I feel certain that that was one of the attractions in reading genre fiction. I will write shortly on heroism, courage, and their opposites. Some of that will also involve cars and driving, which, like violence, seem to go with our America.

Happy Anniversary to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald!

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925), the original dust jacket illustration, executed in gouache, by Spanish artist Francis Cugat (1896-1981). This could easily be a cover of The New Yorker. It could almost work as a cover of Weird Tales, with the nudes in Daisy's eyes drawn by Margaret Brundage.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley