250 Years of Freedom & Independence!

Two hundred fifty years ago today, fifty-six men then assembled in Philadelphia and representing the Thirteen Colonies unanimously approved the Declaration of Independence by which we separated ourselves from the Old World and its ways. American Independence and everything upon which it is predicated and all that it entails is one of the most radical events in human history. It is such a miraculous development that perhaps only the intervention of Divine Providence can explain it. Fifty years ago, the Old World sent its tall ships to America. Now it sends its soccer players and fans, and we welcome them. Perhaps this will give them a view of what is possible once a people and a nation break through the iron-hard bounds of the past, throw off their tyrannical governments, and embrace the rights and freedoms and dignity inherent in every individual person who has ever lived and ever will live. Today we celebrate Independence Day.

Independence Day the movie was released thirty years ago, on June 25, 1996, or the day after Flying Saucer Day. I don't know whether that release date was intended to match an anniversary. Now we have Disclosure Day, which was released in the United States on June 12, 2026, or twelve days before Flying Saucer Day. The initial showing was in Paris. Five out of the six leads are British or Irish. So we have an American movie about an American phenomenon, and yet it was first shown overseas and its actors and actresses are from lands we left behind. Curious.

Disclosure Day involves psychic powers and mind control. In other words, it is not a science fiction movie, for there isn't any science in these things. Psychic powers and mind control are, in scientific terms, nonsense. Physicists talk about all kinds of forces and brands of matter and energy supposedly at work among the stars. Some of these are propositions only. They are not known to exist. And yet they have been set forth and are discussed and considered as scientific possibilities. In contrast, no one has ever proposed a scientifically plausible means of communicating psychically, viewing remotely, moving things with the mind, or any other psychic exercise. Again, in scientific terms, these things are nonsense. In the real world, the idea of psychic powers draws charlatans, or maybe more charitably we can call them performers.

Psychic powers have been a staple in science fiction since at least the Golden Age of the 1930s through the 1950s. But they are not science, and they don't belong in proper science fiction. Call them something else if you'd like, but they're not science fiction. Write about them in some other genre, but don't call it science fiction. Use them in your movie, but don't try to pass it off as a work of science fiction. Beyond any of that, to use psychic powers in a supposed science fiction film at this late date is the equivalent of having a character wake up completely unharmed after being knocked over the head with the butt of a pistol, or, alternatively, developing amnesia from a blow to the head, or having an evil twin, or any other of the very hoary clichés and conventions from decades ago and all of the cheap melodramas of the past. These are not serious ideas. They are instead shortcuts and easy ways out for the unimaginative screenwriter. If you have every possible story to tell about aliens on Earth, why are you writing about psychic powers?

My understanding is that Disclosure Day is also about the contactee and abductee phenomena, which are among the shabbiest (re.: contactees) and saddest (re.: abductees) aspects of the flying saucer story. (In the 1950s, there was a split between those who wanted to study UFOs as a hard, physical, aerial phenomenon and others who wanted to talk about "occupants.") In one advertisement I have seen for Disclosure Day, there is an image of a crop circle. Crop circles are British. They are not part the flying saucer story in America. They really don't belong in an American movie. (That was one of the flaws in the movie Signs, from 2002.) Finally, there are conspiracy theories in Disclosure Day, theories that, in the real world, are or tend to be shabby as well.

So: two movies about two days, a positive and triumphant Independence Day and a paranoid, conspiracy-minded Disclosure Day. How things have changed in the past thirty years. But those of us who remember things from thirty years ago already knew this.

For full disclosure, I have not seen Disclosure Day. But when I heard a review on the radio and it mentioned psychic powers and mind control, I immediately turned against it in my own mind. If I could have sent a psychic message to the moviemakers, I would have. Anyway, if I get a chance, I'll watch it. Maybe it won't be so bad after all.

* * *

Now some facts about America versus the United Kingdom, Europe, and the rest of the Old World:

A quote from: "As Summer Begins, Let’s Give Thanks For A Life-Saving American Invention: Air Conditioning" by the Issues & Insights Editorial Board, June 10, 2026, at the following URL:

https://issuesinsights.com/2026/06/10/as-summer-begins-lets-give-thanks-for-a-life-saving-american-invention-air-conditioning/

Compare the U.S. total [of heat-related deaths] to the EU [European Union], where there are regularly far more deaths from heat than in the U.S. Last year, for example, from June through September, the EU had 62,755 heat-related deaths, or 26 times more than the U.S. in 2024. Here’s another shocking statistic: The EU heat-death total is more than total U.S. deaths annually from gun violence (44,447 for all of 2024).

In other words, Europe sacrifices its people in order to propitiate the gods of global warming. Meanwhile, we in America fend off so many heat-related deaths by comporting ourselves with reality. In Europe, people die for the sake of what European elites call progress. In America, people live and thrive by real progress.

* * *

A quote from: "America at 250: The Greatest Compounding Machine In History" by Meb Faber, dated June 10, 2026, on the website Real Clear Markets at the following URL:

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2026/06/10/america_at_250_the_greatest_compounding_machine_in_history_1187441.html

Since 1800, $1 invested in U.S. equities would have grown to more than $200 million today. Over that same period, the rest of the world combined turned $1 into roughly $2 million. The gap isn't incremental; it's exponential. As Charles Ellis observed, time is Archimedes' lever in investing--and no nation has pulled that lever longer or harder than America. [Boldface added.]

Other nations have squandered their resources on war, attempts at empire-building, schemes of social engineering, the creation and maintenance, such as it is, of welfare states, and various isms, including statism, globalism, internationalism, multiculturalism, and experiments in various brands of socialism and other harmful and destructive ideologies. Under socialism, the deaths and suffering of countless millions, if not billions, are considered historical necessities. They are considered necessary for our march into glorious futures. Now European governments seem determined to destroy their own nations and their own peoples by, among other things, letting in hostile invaders and welfare colonists from other lands. All of these things are also called progress. Meanwhile, Americans have built, maintained, and continuously improved upon a successful, powerful, and enduring means of generating wealth for everyone interested and of raising countless millions, if not billions, out of poverty. You're welcome, Europe and the World.

* * *

According to various sources: the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of Alabama is greater than that of Canada.

According to various other sources: the per capita GDP of Mississippi is greater than that of the United Kingdom. In other words, if the United Kingdom were a state, it would rank 51st in per capita GDP.

According to the World Bank and the United Nations: the per capita GDP of West Virginia is greater than that of Germany.

In other words, three of our southern states (if West Virginia is a southern state), which our elites tell us are full of backward and ignorant people, are outperforming three of the world's supposedly great economies on a per capita basis. I think we can lay the blame once again at the feet of socialists and other progressives, but there are plenty of others to blame, too, including global warmists and, in the Venn diagram of progressivism, the overlapping globalists who prefer foreign invaders and colonists from afar--especially members of the religion of pieces--to their own people. They try to shed blame, of course. To them, these things are also known as progress.

* * *

Finally, according to various sources: the fifth leading cause of death in Canada is assisted suicide, or state-sponsored euthanasia, in other words, murder.

The United States has invaded Canada twice in hopes of bringing that British-oid nation into the fold of American freedom. Both times they sent us packing. But we don't want them now if they're going to remain in the business of murdering their own people, who can no longer be considered citizens but instead have been reduced to serfs, or something even lower than that in the great chain of being. Call them instead livestock. One explanation for this kind of thing is that a suicidal nation will encourage suicide in its people.

I said we don't want them, but I guess we'll take Alberta if that comes about.

* * *

Thank God and thank the Founding Fathers and all of the Patriots of the Revolutionary Era that we separated ourselves from the madness, murder, tyranny, and oppression of Great Britain, Europe, and their now worldwide ideological satellites. Once again, America, the Empire of Liberty, stands alone. And still we will stand, I hope for hundreds of more years to come, for as long as we remain the indispensable nation and dedicated to the propositions stated so profoundly and eloquently in our Declaration of Independence.

Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1942, with cover art by Charles de Feo (1891-1978).

Happy Independence Day, America!

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Summer & Fall Reading

I read this summer Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Anne Jacobsen (2011; 2012). It's an interesting and pretty thorough history but not always very well written, especially in regards to airplanes and aviation. Anyway, the author asserts that the supposed crashdown at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 involved a Soviet flying saucer built using captured Nazi technology and mutated Mini-Me pilots, all without providing any evidence at all. Her description of Bob Lazar's account of seeing flying saucers and dead or injured pilots at Area 51 led me to believe that a similar scene in The Shape of Water (2017) was inspired by Mr. Lazar's supposed experience. So one fiction from another.

In September I read Ghosts, edited by Grant Overton and published in 1927 by Funk & Wagnall's. "The Two Drovers" by Sir Walter Scott tells of a most terrible event in the lives of two former friends. "Kari Aasen in Heaven" by Johan Bojer is a beautiful and charming fantasy. And "A Source of Irritation," a story of the Great War by Stacy Aumonier, is very funny. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving is in Ghosts as well. Reading that story got me started on thinking and writing about H.P. Lovecraft, the Hudson River, and other recent topics.

In October I read A Fan's Notes: A Fictional Memoir by Frederick Exley (1968). The late Mr. Exley gave us another view of the Hudson River. Reading his book led me to write about still more topics during this past month (November-December 2025).

Also in October, I read The Negotiator by Frederick Forsyth (1989). I afterwards found out that Mr. Forsyth died earlier this year. I wrote about him and Martin Cruz Smith on November 10, 2025. They are two of the writers we lost in 2025.

Not long ago, I found a paperback book called Soviet Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov and published in 1962 by Collier Books. I read it in October. There are six stories in its pages. All are good and reveal a different kind of sensibility than what you will find in western science fiction. If I had to name a favorite, it would be "Infra Draconis" by G. Gurevich (1917-1998), who was born in the month following the abdication of the Russian tsar. It made me think a little of Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977).

In October I read The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester (1976). As with his earlier novels, this one is experimental, only more so. To meet the zeitgeist of the 1970s, it's also a little trippy. Bester mentioned Richard Nixon several times in his book. There's nothing wrong with that, but authors who include people and events of their day risk seeing their works becoming quickly dated. People of today, driven insane by their contemplations of our current president, should remember that. Their rants will not play well in the future and may prove incomprehensible to readers and viewers of the future. That's especially true of science fiction that is set in the future, for no one fifty or a hundred years from now is going to care or think about or talk about Nixon or Trump or almost anybody else from the past. They may not even know who those people are. In short, don't make your fiction outdated in the moment that you create it.

Anyway, there is a creature in The Computer Connection--I forget its name--that can be to added to The Internet Ooze, Blobs, Jellies, & Slime Database. In a book of extremely rapid-fire ideas and extrapolations, I found the earliest instance that I can remember of one fictional character addressing another as "dude," also the first instance of one character saying to another, "Wait for it, wait for it." I haven't seen the most recent Mission: Impossible movie, but reading a plot summary makes me think that there are similarities between it and Bester's novel, specifically in the attempt to evade the scrutiny of an otherwise all-seeing computer intelligence. But then we saw the same kind of thing in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

In October I started to read Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith (Ballantine Books, 1975). I didn't get very far: I had read too much science fiction and reading another such novel seemed to be even more too-much. So I turned to another type of story. (See below.) But in reading the first pages of Norstrilia, I came upon some of the same kinds of themes (or yearnings) that I had found in The Computer Connection, namely: a) Immortality; and b) Mental telepathy or psychic powers. There is a lot of both in science fiction. They seem to be the twin desires or fantasies of an awful lot of science fiction authors. That's a curious thing, considering psychic powers are a hoax or pseudoscience, while immortality is a spiritual issue and nothing else.

Mental telepathy or psychic powers are a subject of almost no appeal and no interest to me. As soon as I come across them in one book I begin to think about reading another. But if I think not about myself and my own tastes and instead about what writers tell us about themselves in the subjects that interest them and about which they write, then these things become more interesting and revealing. Thinking about them offers the reader the opportunity to explore ideas and gain insights into science fiction and its various authors. For example, an interest in mental telepathy or psychic powers would appear to be closely tied to the science-fictional concept of the superior man, or superman, so common in the 1930s, rampant in the 1940s, and continuing into the decades that followed. I imagine that some science fiction authors feel themselves superior to ordinary humans, a feeling that probably comes from a sneaking suspicion that they are in fact the opposite. Maybe a yearning for psychic powers is an adolescent power fantasy. Or maybe it's a yearning to escape from the self and to be unified with the rest of humanity in a kind of one-mind.

One thing that science fiction authors don't seem to realize is that if we could read each other's minds, writing would necessarily come to an end. Why would you express yourself and attempt to communicate through writing when you can simply meld your mind to that of another person? Why should I read what you write if I can simply see it in its original? Why wade through things conveyed by the imperfect medium of language when we can draw directly from the source? Put another way, if there were mind-reading, then that would make an end to storytelling and reading. (Even if mind-reading were possible, the mind cannot be read like words on a printed page. There actually wouldn't be any "reading" at all, but a kind of immersion in the mind-state of another person.) As for immortality, we all might seek it, but the only way open to us would seem to require the existence of God and a promised afterlife. (The idea of uploading our minds into a forever-android or -computer is both ridiculous and sophomoric.) That's probably too much for most science fiction authors, however, for men and women of this type are ultimately science-minded and science-oriented. Contemplation of God and an afterlife is probably too icky for writers of this type.

So instead of reading Norstrilia, I turned to a crime and detective novel, The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown (1949). That was a good choice for me. Brown's novel is closer in time and space than is Norstrilia, closer also in terms of its culture and setting (i.e., 1940s Chicago). It's more immediate and familiar than is a science fiction novel of other times and places. Norstrilia and stories like it are too distant, too remote (it's set 25,000 years in the future on a far-distant planet), and, frankly, too much of the author's own personal fantasy. The Screaming Mimi, on the other hand, takes place in the real world, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. (We should admit, however, that even hardboiled detective novels are fantasies.) I would add that The Screaming Mimi and stories like it are ultimately more human than is an outright fantasy, even if some of its plot points, moreover its climax, are somewhat mechanical or not entirely plausible. (Mechanical, that is, as the word relates to the mechanics of storytelling.) By the way, there is a lot of drinking in The Screaming Mimi. And I mean a lot of drinking. Brown seems to have known whereof he wrote.

In November I read Time of the Great Freeze by Robert Silverberg (1964). We're probably not allowed to read books like this one because it's not about global warming but instead about global cooling. I know, heresy. I'm surprised Montag the fireman hasn't come around to burn my copy into ashes, but then that would send more world-ending carbon into the atmosphere. Anyway, I read it and enjoyed it (despite the fact that there isn't even one woman in sight). It's really a boy's adventure book except that it's set in the future. Towards the end, men in aircraft arrive to save the day. That makes me think of the events in the middle sequence of the film Things to Come (1936).

In November I read A Walk Out of the World by Ruth Nichols (1969), with nice illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman. Ruth Nichols was still a teenager when she wrote her first book. I found it to be a pure, gentle, innocent, and beautiful fantasy. It was almost certainly inspired by the Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. The climax is refreshing. This is a woman's version of the end of a conflict versus that of a man.

Finally, I started reading McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003) in November. I find Stephen King's and Michael Crichton's stories to be two of the poorest in the book so far. The late Mr. Crichton's is very nearly pointless and gratuitous in the extreme. Elmore Leonard's is the best so far--and by a long shot, no pun intended--but then I have heard he was a good writer. And now I find that Elmore Leonard was born in 1925. I have written this year (and recently) about other people born in 1925, including Flannery O'Connor, Jack Matthews, Lou Feck, June Lockhart, Alec Penstone, and a man named Floyd, whom I saw in October at a Veterans Administration clinic in distant Appalachia.

There is in Thrilling Tales a story with needless product placement (Lego, UPS, etc.) by Dan Shaon. So now we know that such a practice goes back at least as far as 2003. I'll keep railing against it wherever I find it. The book opens with an old-fashioned adventure story, written in the naturalistic tradition, about a hunt for a Megalodon. It's a self-aware story, though, and includes an inside joke/insider information in its mention of Bernard Heuvelmans. That one is by Jim Shepard. Finally for now, there is an elephant story by Glen David Gold, one to go along with another, "Hoity-Toity" by A. Belayev, in Soviet Science Fiction. These would make the beginnings of an anthology, or, if you will allow it, an elephanthology.

Revised later in the day. I also hit the "Enter" key a few times. Corrected on July 28, 2026.
Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

An Alien Invasion for Halloween

On Halloween I worked on a windy hilltop and in the evening drove on dark roads under a half-moon, including a road that runs along the route that the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln took from Washington, D.C., to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. By the time I got to where I was going, it was too late to do anything Halloween-related, but the next night we watched a scary movie on TV, and so that's what I'll write about today.

The movie is called The Faculty, and it was released in 1998. It's an alien invasion movie that takes place in the fictional town of Herrington, Ohio.* There are lots of characters in The Faculty but not too many. The main characters are high school students, but there are teachers and other faculty, too. The faculty members are taken over by aliens, one by one, and soon the students are, too. Pretty soon it becomes hard to tell who is an alien and who is still human.

The Faculty owes a lot to previous science fiction stories and movies, and it knows and acknowledges that. For example, one character refers to The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (1954, 1955) as a ripoff of The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951). I don't see it that way, but that's beside the point. The point is that the moviemakers are letting us know that they know that their own story is essentially a ripoff. Theirs is a deflection but a harmless one. Once we're aware that they're aware, we can sit back and enjoy the movie instead of saying, "This is all just a ripoff." By the way, that character, played by Clea DuVall, is the science fiction expert.** It is from her that the others learn about the nature of the alien threat and how to nullify it. She knows these things only by having read lots of science fiction stories. Like Faye Dunaway's character in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), she just knows and there isn't any need to find out. It's a neat trick by the moviemakers and avoids a lot of screen time spent on investigations when the main action in the movie is essentially a chase scene and a lot of hiding and sneaking.

The Faculty has things in common with The Blob (1956), too, but nobody in the movie mentions that. They do mention Independence Day (1996), however, and question why aliens would come to Earth in a podunk place in Ohio versus landing on the lawn of the White House. By asking that question, they essentially answer it, for a quiet and insidious invasion is more likely to work beginning in a place where people who are more powerful and more able to resist aren't rather than are.*** Remember that The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) begins in a small town in California and that the alien pods are grown and distributed as like an agricultural product. Rather than a great mother ship, the vehicle of invasion turns out to be a lowly farm truck.

There is in The Faculty an oblique reference to a concept that C.M. Kornbluth memorably covered in his short story "The Silly Season" (1950), namely that we are being softened up for invasion by repeated false reports--or in this case stories and movies about alien invasions--of  flying saucers. If you cry wolf enough times, nobody believes you when the wolf really arrives at your door. I can't say, though, that the movie-makers were aware of Kornbluth's story.

There is one other movie at least to which The Faculty owes a debt, for this film is a lot like a science-fiction version of The Breakfast Club (1985), with Jordana Brewster as Molly Ringwald, Clea DuVall as Ally Sheedy, Shawn Hatosy as Emilio Estevez, Josh Hartnett as Judd Nelson, and Elijah Wood as Anthony Michael Hall. That's an imperfect comparison, but it seems close enough. By the way, Laura Harris is an actress without a counterpart in The Breakfast Club, but there's reason for that. Watch the movie and you'll find out why. Another by-the-way: the queen-mother alien**** in The Faculty, as well as her little offspring, have tentacles. I would say that their lineage can be traced to H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds from a century before.

It's too late to say Happy Halloween for the year 2025. I had intended to but arrived too late. Maybe this is close enough. Next I'll write about a couple of recent developments in the wider world.

----- 

*Super Eight (2011) takes place in Ohio, too, supposedly in western Ohio, even if the name Belmont County comes over the police radio. Belmont County is actually on the exact opposite end of the state. And what is the most populous city in Belmont County? None other than Martins Ferry, birthplace of William Dean Howells.

**She is first shown reading Double Star, another book by Heinlein, published in 1956. While we're on the subject of ripoffs--or call them more politely influences, inspirations, or homages--we can say that Double Star owes a lot to The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, from 1894.

***If the train wreck and chemical spill that happened in East Palestine, Ohio, had happened instead in President John Gill's Delaware, there would have been a completely different response from his regime. We can be sure of that.

****Sigourney Weaver of Alien (1979) earns mention in The Faculty as well.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Donald Keyhoe in National Geographic-Part Two

As I was paging through Donald E. Keyhoe's article "Seeing America with Lindbergh," published in The National Geographic Magazine in January 1928, I was struck by an oblique aerial photograph, and its caption, of the new airport at Oakland, California:

The caption reads:

A GLIMPSE OF THE CROWD AT OAKLAND (SEE, ALSO, PAGE 39)

     This modern airport when completed will cover 825 acres and will be one of the largest in the world. At present it has one runway 7,000 feet long and 250 feet wide. There is also a square area, part of which is here shown, now ready for use. This is 1,700 by 2,500 feet. The white circle and the name "Oakland" are made permanent by the use of crushed stone. These markings are a very great help to the airman who is flying cross-country over strange territory. Hangars, night lighting equipment, and other apparatus are being installed.

- - -

Pay special attention to the word "Oakland," the white circle with its stem, and the white square with its longer stem to the left. These features, along with the words of the caption--"These markings are a very great help to the airman who is flying cross-country over strange territory"--reminded me of other images and other ideas . . .

The idea pointed out by Keyhoe in his picture and caption is that large symbols made on the ground can be used to communicate with viewers in the air. If you read works of Forteana, you have probably encountered this idea before. I know I have, and I might have a date for my first such encounter: January 5, 1973, when the documentary In Search of Ancient Astronauts was first broadcast on NBC-TV. Or maybe it was on September 6, 1973, when "one of the most talked-about television specials of the past season" was repeated. The source of the quote is a syndicated feature article from various American newspapers published in September 1973. I suspect the documentary was repeated at later dates, too.

In Search of Ancient Astronauts is based on the book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken, published in 1968 and adapted to film in 1970. One segment of In Search of Ancient Astronauts is about the lines graven into the plains of Nazca in southern Peru. The "conclusion reached by von Däniken," says the narrator Rod Serling, using his best Twilight Zone/Night Gallery voice, is that these lines "represent a landing field: the Plain of Nazca is a gigantic abandoned airport."

Here are two images, with captions, from a double-page spread in Mr. von Däniken's book (Bantam Books, 1971):

The captions read:

(Above:)

Another of the strange markings on the Plain of Nazca. This is very reminiscent of the aircraft parking areas in a modern airport.

(It's also reminiscent of the circle and stem at the Oakland airport in 1927.)

(Below:)

This huge 820-foot figure above the Bay of Pisco points to the Plain of Nazca. Could this be an aerial direction indicator rather than a symbol of religious significance?

(In other words, could this figure have been put into place to help "the airman who is flying cross-country over strange territory"?)

- - -

The idea of communicating with people in the air from signals on the ground predated In Search of Ancient Astronauts, Chariots of the Gods?, and Donald Keyhoe's article from 1928, for in its issue of April 1920, Popular Mechanics published an article by Paul H. Woodruff called "Perhaps Mars Is Signaling Earth." The article begins with a recounting of events from January 1920, when "Marconi commercial-wireless stations at New York and London reported the receipt of certain strange and undecipherable signals." (p. 495) The author of the article quoted several prominent astronomers and physicists, including Albert Einstein, regarding these signals. An idea bandied about was that they were from people on another planet. A further idea was how we of Earth might signal them back.

There were different ways of doing that according to the men quoted in the article. Here is an illustration of one to go along with today's theme:

The caption reads:

Sir Oliver Lodge's Simple Suggestion Is to Form a Gigantic Geometrical Figure on the Surface of the Sahara Desert, Which Would Be Visible to a Martian Observer through a Telescope as Powerful as Those Used on Earth. It would be Understood as a Sign Because Geometry Is a Science of the Universe.

- - - 

We have encountered Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) before. Although he was a physicist, he was also the opposite of a physicist, that is, a spiritualist. I first wrote about him in an article called "Dr. Dorp by Otis Adelbert Kline," posted on September 4, 2023. You can read what I wrote by clicking here. Although Lodge, as a physicist, would have been interested in other planets and possible signals from outer space, I sense that his interest here had more to do with his beliefs in the paranormal and other things outside the realm of science. His geometric shape here might be a triangle, but it's also the shape of a pyramid in profile. (So now we have three basic shapes, circle, square, and triangle.) And look at that, there are four pyramids in the foreground. These are no doubt for scale, but they also introduce a connection to these ancient, mysterious, and some would say occult structures. Remember that proponents of the ancient astronauts hypothesis believe that the pyramids of Egypt were constructed with the help of extraterrestrial knowledge and technology. In the 1920s, there were paranormal and weird-fictional connections, for example in "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" by Houdini, ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft and published in the May/June/July issue of Weird Tales magazine. I'll have more on Egypt before too much longer.

The idea that people on other planets are watching those of Earth was older still. Here is the opening of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1897; 1898):

     No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

- - -

If Sir Oliver Lodge felt like Martians were watching us, maybe he had that idea from H.G. Wells in his work of less than a quarter-century before that April 1920 issue of Popular Mechanics.

But if Martians were watching us, we were watching them, too, and we believed we could see shapes and lines on the surface of their planet as well. In the 1880s and 1890s, American astronomers reported seeing canals and other strange and mysterious features on the surface of Mars. Among them was William H. Pickering (1858-1938), part of whose work was carried out at Arequipa, Peru, which is not very close at all to Nazca. By the way, there are pyramids near Nazca, too. These are called the Cahuachi pyramids.

The so-called Canals of Mars are most closely associated with Percival Lowell (1855-1916), though, who watched Mars for years and wrote three books about his observations. I can only assume that his first, Mars (1895), excited the imaginations of people all over the world and was an influence upon Wells in the composition of his novel of interplanetary invasion. Lowell no doubt inspired other authors of science fiction, too. From Wikipedia:

     Lowell's influence on science fiction remains strong. The canals figure prominently in Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein (1949) and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950). The canals, and even Lowell's mausoleum, heavily influence[d] The Gods of Mars (1918) by Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as all other books in the Barsoom series.

- - -

Like the circle at the Oakland airport, we come back to beginnings, namely Donald E. Keyhoe. In his last book, Aliens from Space . . . The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects, published in 1973, Major Keyhoe devoted a whole chapter to what he called Operation Lure. Originally developed by--but not really, as we have seen--Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994), Operation Lure would have been designed to lure space aliens to land as if they were ducks landing on a pond stocked with decoys. Here is Keyhoe's one-sentence summary of Operation Lure:

     The Lure will be an isolated base with unusual structures and novel displays, designed to attract the UFO aliens' attention. (p. 291)

- - -

The main observation post for Earthmen would have been called Control, like in Get Smart. A communications station twenty-five miles distance from Control would have been called "Relay," like in Pete Townshend's never-completed project, Lifehouse. If you have never heard The Who song "Relay," you might want to give it a listen. In it, Mr. Townshend invented the Internet. Listen for the lyric, "The word is getting out about control."

The circle is getting tighter still: in Aliens from Space, Keyhoe wrote about ancient aliens, mentioning the Piri Reis map, the Theosophical Book of Dzyan, the plains at Nazca, the pyramids of Egypt, and even Carl Sagan!

Next: Miscellany about Keyhoe, Lindbergh, Heinlein, and other things.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Nictzin Dyalhis & Donald Edward Keyhoe

Nictzin Dyalhis (1873?-1942) had his first story in Weird Tales in April 1925. So did Donald Edward Keyhoe (1897-1988). Dyalhis' story was of course "When the Green Star Waned," a science-fantasy set in the solar system of the future. Keyhoe's story was "The Grim Passenger," a tale of Egyptian archaeology and a pharaoh's curse. "The Grim Passenger" is, then, about the past. As it turns out, it is also set in the past, the past, that is, of 1925. You'll have to read the story to find out the year. I don't want to give away Keyhoe's twist ending.

"When the Green Star Waned" is in the prose style of the pulps. Dyalhis seems to have been influenced by H.G. Wells, but it looks like the greater influence came from Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Martian tales. In contrast, "The Grim Passenger" is almost journalistic or documentary in its tone and style. It could almost be an article rather than a story. In fact, it's barely a story as we understand and enjoy works of fiction. It seems to exist mainly for its twist ending and the occult connection made between one event and another. It's a somewhat Fortean construction, or like an expanded vignette from Ripley's Believe It or Not! If it had been true or mostly true, it would have found a place in later books by Frank Edwards or Vincent Gaddis.

Nictzin Dyalhis had eight stories in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1940 and five more in other magazines during those same decades. These proved very popular with readers. It's a shame there weren't more, even if, as I suspect, they were revised or even rewritten by authors within Farnsworth Wright's stable. (Maybe Dyalhis was the Richard Shaver of Weird Tales.) Despite the popularity and success of his stories and the powers of imagination behind them, Dyalhis worked as a common laborer and a hardscrabble farmer. He lived in poverty and died in almost complete obscurity. He was survived by his wife and daughter. The daughter died not long ago. She had children of her own, and so the enigmatic Nictzin Dyalhis still has living descendants. I doubt that anyone knows his real name. The facts of his life are extremely scanty. At least one of the supposed facts in his obituary is wrong. 

Donald E. Keyhoe moved in different circles. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1919 and served as a pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, eventually attaining the rank of major (with his service during World War II). Although he wrote scads of stories for the lowly pulps, he was also an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce and an associate of the most famous aviator of his time, Charles Lindbergh, for whom he managed a 22,000-mile aerial tour of the United States in 1927. I'll have more on that next time.

Keyhoe was born on June 20, 1897. Four days after his fiftieth birthday, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, another airplane pilot, saw a flight of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier in Washington State. These and other such objects of course became known as flying saucers, named for Arnold's description of the way they flew. (The original description was of crescent-shaped or flying wing-type aircraft. They were decidedly not discs.) Keyhoe became deeply interested in--eventually obsessed with--the flying saucer phenomena. In January 1950, True magazine published his article "The Flying Saucers Are Real." It proved a sensation, and Keyhoe expanded it into a book of the same name, published shortly thereafter.

Several more flying saucer books flew from his typewriter. The last came in 1973, which can be considered the last year of the flying saucer era. In 1957, he took over as director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), founded the previous year. Also in 1956, the film Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, based on Keyhoe's Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953), was released. In this one, Hugh Marlowe played the hero instead of a louse, as he did in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is still a very watchable and enjoyable movie. Look for an alien abduction scene as a precursor to later, supposedly real-life abductions, such as in the case of Betty and Barney Hill.

Donald Keyhoe was a conspiracy theorist, though probably not the original conspiracy theorist when it came to flying saucers. On March 8, 1958, he appeared on ABC-TV on The Mike Wallace Interview, starring Mike Wallace and a Parliament cigarette. Keyhoe did pretty well in the interview, I think. Mike Wallace was not the savage interviewer of later years. Listen for the word "misinformation." The point of this is that Keyhoe and his subject, flying saucers, were taken seriously enough to have appeared on national television, where he was interviewed at length by a prominent and well-respected journalist. There has been recent media coverage of flying saucers, but this doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Recent witnesses might long for the 1950s.

In his last book, Aliens from Space . . . The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects (1973), Keyhoe covered the whole phenomenon and its various (human) actors. He speculated on the physical appearance of aliens from space. He also suggested that aliens might be up to no good. It's interesting that his first story in Weird Tales appeared in an issue in which a tale of an alien invasion of Earth was so prominent. In his own story of April 1925, Keyhoe looked to the past. In Nictzin Dyalhis' story, maybe Keyhoe saw the future.

I think Donald Keyhoe went to his grave believing in what he saw as the truth behind flying saucers. He died at age ninety-one on November 29, 1988. His obituary appeared in the Washington Post. Major Keyhoe was survived by his wife and three children. I don't know whether he has any living descendants.

In looking through Aliens from Space, I came upon the name of another teller of weird tales. He was Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994). By a strange coincidence, Carr also had his first story in Weird Tales in 1925. Entitled "The Composite Brain," it was published in the March issue. As it turned out, Carr became special advisor to NICAP, and so his path crossed that of Major Keyhoe three decades or more after they had had their stories in Weird Tales. Carr had lots of ideas, one of which was called Operation Lure. But this idea wasn't new at all. It had first been proposed in that decade of origins, the 1920s, in the pages of Popular Mechanics. It, too, seems to have been influenced by H.G. Wells in that Martians have been watching us and we have in turn observed phenomena on the surface of their Red Planet. It seems there is always watching and listening going on . . .

Next: Donald E. Keyhoe in National Geographic.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

April Aliens & April Invasions

The cover story and lead story in the April 1925 issue of Weird Tales is "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis. The "Green Star" of the title is Earth as seen from the planet Venus. The men of Venus have noticed that the green light of Earth has faded and that their neighboring planet has gone silent. These two developments have raised the alarm on Venus. The great men of that planet decide to travel to Earth to find out what has happened. (1, 2)

"When the Green Star Waned" is about an alien invasion of Earth. The aliens of the story have enslaved Earthmen and it is we who prove weak, helpless, and powerless to save ourselves. The heroes and rescuers in "When the Green Star Waned" are in fact Venus-Men rather than Earthmen. That alone makes for an unusual story. There are other ways in which "When the Green Star Waned" is unusual or innovative.

Nictzin Dyalhis' story is an early example of weird fantasy, science fantasy, space fantasy, or the weird-science type of story. Later science fiction would treat the same kind of situation--going up against alien invaders of other planets--except that it is Earthmen who are the heroes and rescuers. It is we who free the oppressed, enslaved, or exploited peoples of those planets. The same kind of plot became a staple of the television show Star Trek, broadcast four decades after "When the Green Star Waned" was published. The episode "Operation--Annihilate!", first broadcast in April 1967, is an example. The plot of that episode has similarities to The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein before it (1951) and the movie Alien afterwards (1979).

There was a contrary development during the Flying Saucer Era of 1947 to 1968 or 1973. During that era, aliens from outer space were often represented as good and caring and benevolent. They were our space brothers, or like angels from on high. Their purpose in coming to Earth was to save us from ourselves. This is what much of the Contactee phenomenon of the 1950s was about. The space brother/space angel/space savior idea was captured pretty well in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, released in 1951.

A description of the alien invaders in "When the Green Star Waned" must have sounded familiar to readers of what was then called the pseudo-scientific story (see "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud in Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), scientifiction (Hugo Gernsback's name for stories of this type), or the scientific romance (a term more commonly used in Great Britain, I think). A passage from "When the Green Star Waned":

     And here we found life, such as it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok's height, with a gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.

     Well it was for me that, in obedience to Hul Jok's imperative command, I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me; for as I blundered full upon the monstrosity it upheaved its ugly bulk--how, I do not know, for I saw no legs nor did it have wings--to one edge and would have flopped down upon me, but instinctively I slid forward the catch on the tiny Blastor, and the foul thing vanished--save for a few fragments of its edges--smitten into nothingness by the vibrations hurled forth from that powerful little disintegrator.

Here is a similar passage, of the narrator's first encounter with an alien, in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, first published in Pearson's Magazine from April to December 1897:

    A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.

    Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

    Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

Dyalhis' aliens aren't quite the same as Wells', but his description of them is close enough that I sense the influence of the latter upon the former. Wells' prose here found echoes in that of H.P. Lovecraft, too, I think. Maybe there was an influence there as well.

By the way, Nictzin Dayalhis was the originator of the term Blastor, later blaster, a weapon that will forever be indispensable in our fight against alien invasions.

Next: Andrew Brosnatch's Cover.

Note
(1) Light as an indication of life has been in the news as I write, for a spectrographic analysis of the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b shows signs of what some scientists believe could be life on that planet. (A skepto-graphic analysis might show something different.) The indicating compounds are sulfurous. Sulfur has of course been associated with Hell, the Devil, and a general wickedness or evil. Hold onto that thought for next time.

(2) The silence of the planet Earth in "When the Green Star Waned" makes me think of Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. In Lewis' version, Earth is "silent" because we are under a kind of cosmic quarantine, the reason being that human beings are "bent," another way of saying, I guess, that we are fallen in our nature. Hold onto the idea of a fallen man for next time as well.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

"The Traveler" by Francesco Tignini

At just two pages of text, "The Traveler" by Francesco Tignini is the shortest story in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. There are three illustrations accompanying the story, a full-page illustration taking up the main title page, and two half-page illustrations after that. There are also eight breaks, signified by little black Cthulhus or mean-faced tentacled aliens. The whole thing makes for some pretty thin content.

Francesco Tignini is presumably the same person who has worked in television and movies as an assistant director, production assistant, unit production manager, producer, and actor. He has a page on the social media website Goodreads. As I write, on November 16, 2024, he is reading books by Jonathan Maberry, the current editor of Weird Tales magazine. (Maybe they're working on a TV project together.) So the pattern still holds: Francesco Tignini works in TV and movies and is not primarily an author of works in prose, and he is a friend of the editor, in other words, an insider. H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote a story called "The Outsider." As an outsider, would he have been welcome in the current Weird Tales?

"The Traveler" is an alien abduction story. It has just about all of the most worn-out tropes of that type: A man is driving alone at night on a back road. His trip is interrupted. He sees bright lights in the sky or on the ground. Leaving his car, he comes upon the typical gray alien. Although the alien has come here from another star system by some incredibly advanced technology, his spacecraft has broken down and he's trying to repair it like Goober on The Andy Griffith Show. Rendered unconscious, the man is taken aboard the alien craft. There he undergoes an examination. We have seen and read all of this before. Some of it was in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in 1956. Most of it was in the supposedly true accounts of Betty and Barney Hill. It was also in a tale told by scoutmaster Sonny DesVergers in 1952. (He was a Florida Man, maybe one of the first.) There was another account, more well known than DesVergers'. That one involved Travis Walton. We were promised new things in "The Eyrie." There is a slight twist at the end of Mr. Tignini's story, but there is really nothing new here. I have a sense that the editor and his authors think that we as readers don't know anything about fiction, literature, art, history, storytelling, or popular culture, that we have never seen or heard any of these things before. If that's what's happening, I think it's kind of insulting.

The only name dropped in "The Traveler" is that of Chuck Berry. (Well, him and Bigfoot.) This is done, I guess, so that we know that the author is cool and with it. He mixes his tenses. I don't know why. He also has a pretty limited vocabulary. The F-word is one of his favorites. He uses it six times, I think, in two pages of text. This is almost his whole description of the alien craft: "a f--king spaceship." Wow. Way to write. There are other vulgarities, too. And there is at least one seeming anachronism: the man's car is equipped with both an airbag and a pushbutton cigarette lighter, and he carries a cellphone. But this is what TV people do: they think we don't notice their anachronisms, mistakes, inconsistencies, plot holes, ignorance, lack of research, etc. As for cosmic horror content, there is in this story the alien presence but not much of the void or abyss. The narrator looks towards the road and sees: "Nothing. Darkness." He looks towards the forest. What does he see? "Nothing. Darkness."

I guess it pays to be an insider and a friend of the editor.

It's hard for me to believe that the editor couldn't find a better story from the countless number of writers populating this vast continent, or even from the slush pile that must surely still exist in the files of Weird Tales. I'll close by saying that among the duties of an editor is to maintain high quality in the magazine under his charge. If that high quality is not maintained, we really shouldn't blame the authors. Instead the blame must fall on the editor.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

More Strength, More Joy

I wanted to be done with this topic, but there is always more of everything, at the door and waiting to come in.

Today (Sept. 10, 2024), I read an article about Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), that notorious, mid-century, whacked-out, Freudian-Marxist, crackpot pseudoscientist and chaser after flying saucers. (1) I'll tell you, there aren't enough adjectives and epithets to describe this guy. Anyway, I came across a quote from him that leads to another quote that leads back to the topic of Strength Through Joy from the other day. I say "the other day" in the Midwestern sense, meaning any day between yesterday and several weeks ago.

Here is Reich on joy and strength:

This future order cannot and will not be other than, as Lenin put it, a full love-life yielding joy and strength. Little as we can say about the details of such a life, it is nevertheless certain that in the Communist society the sexual needs of human beings will once more come into their own. . . . Evidence that socialism alone can bring about sexual liberation is on our side. (2) [Boldface added; ellipses in Mr. Panero's original article. See the note below for the source.]

Ah, so Strength Through Joy came from Lenin. But where from Lenin? Well, here from Lenin:

"Besides, emancipation of love is neither a novel nor a communistic idea. You will recall that it was advanced in fine literature around the middle of the past century as 'emancipation of the heart'. In bourgeois practice it materialized into emancipation of the flesh. It was preached with greater talent than now, though I cannot judge how it was practiced. Not that I want my criticism to breed asceticism. That is farthest from my thoughts. Communism should not bring asceticism, but joy and strength, stemming, among other things, from a consummate love life. Whereas today, in my opinion, the obtaining plethora of sex life yields neither joy nor strength. On the contrary, it impairs them. This is bad, very bad, indeed, in the epoch of revolution.

     "Young people are particularly in need of joy and strength. Healthy sports, such as gymnastics, swimming, hiking, physical exercises of every description and a wide range of intellectual interests is what they need, as well as learning, study and research, and as far as possible collectively. This will be far more useful to young people than endless lectures and discussions on sex problems and the so-called living by one's nature. Mens sana in corpore sana. Be neither monk nor Don Juan, but not anything in between either, like a German Philistine." [Boldface added.]

That long quote is from "Lenin on the Women's Question," an interview conducted in 1920 by Clara Zetkin (1857-1933), a German Marxist and feminist. You can easily find it on the Internet.

Lenin was of course a socialist, but he was of the international variety. Nazis were socialists, too, but of the opposing national variety. These people couldn't stand each other. And yet the Nazis seem to have gone to Lenin for his concept of strength through joy, at least when it came to "[h]ealthy sports, such as gymnastics, swimming, hiking, physical exercises of every description." Activities like these were of course part the program under the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude, or KdF, established in 1933, thirteen years after Lenin gave his interview.

It seems to have been Reich and men like him, particularly of the Frankfurt School, who departed from Lenin's proscription against what he considered the bourgeois "emancipation of the flesh" and a "plethora of sex life." (3) In Lenin's analysis, these things impair rather than yield joy and strength. On top of that, they're "bad, very bad" for the Marxist revolution. Imagine: Lenin seems to have come out in favor of conventional and committed love-relationships between men and women, all the better, I guess, to keep the revolution going. The revolution, after all, was the thing.

Reich, a Marxist to be sure but a Freudian as well, went the other way. He and his followers, even unto today, would seem to be the Philistines in Lenin's formulation, although I'm not sure I understand the reference exactly. (Maybe it was to Rousseau, a Swiss, or to Goethe, a German, but I just can't say. See the note below.) In any case, it looks like Lenin has been kicked into the dustbin of history. After all, it is critical theory and other ideas of the Frankfurt School and the New Left--all pretty heavy on sex and what people call gender--that have taken over the minds of people in academia and the Western élite. In contrast, who today calls himself a Marxist-Leninist? Poor Lenin. He must be turning over on his bier.

* * *

By the way, Reich's followers included Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, a sure indication that even very intelligent people can be extremely stupid. As for the literature and cinema of science fiction and fantasy, Reichian ideas--rather, his gadgets--are in Barbarella (1968) and Sleeper (1973), as well as in the video of Kate Bush's song "Cloudbusting" (1985). One of those gadgets, the orgone accumulator, makes me think of L. Ron Hubbard's E-meter, a different kind of gadget that he swiped from Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965). Both are pseudoscientific instruments that would have found an easy place in the science fiction of their day. They may very well have been inspired by science fiction, just as flying saucers were. (Like Hubbard, Reich believed that aliens from outer space have come to Earth.) So the path seems to start in science fiction before moving into the real world, after which it goes back into science fiction. The problem is that people forget where it all started. They lose the origin story and see the beginnings of these things in the real world rather than in the imagined worlds of science fiction.

By the way, both Wilhelm Reich and L. Ron Hubbard were influenced by Freudian psychology, which you could also call a pseudoscience if you want.

Connections between real-world pseudosciences and the imaginary worlds of science fiction continue. For example: Reich's Maine estate, called Orgonon, recalls the Valley of the Pines, run by Joseph A. Sadony (1877-1960) close to the shores of Lake Michigan. In attendance there for many years was Meredith Beyers (1899-1996), who, like Volney Mathison, was a teller of weird tales.

Another example: science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard had his own real-world hideout. Sometimes it was on board a ship at sea. Towards the end of his life, Hubbard, depraved as always but then in extreme decay, retreated to a secluded ranch in California. Instead of being like Captain Nemo on his Mysterious Island, Hubbard put his ocean-going days behind him and died in his bed, in a motor home, his hair and nails grown long the way people used to say happened with corpses. Lenin died in bed, too. His corpse has remained static in the one hundred years since his death. Happy death anniversary, V.I. We don't miss you.

* * *

These men and men like them were and are like Bond villains or pulp-fiction or comic-book supervillains who live in great wealth in their secret lairs, secluded estates, hidden valleys, expensive vessels, and other hideouts peopled with anonymous but extremely loyal henchmen who, as it happens, always die in droves when the hero shows up. Unlike fictional villains, however, the real-world pseudoscientist, theorist, and experimenter usually lives with only few attendants, their numbers often dwindling as the years go by, and he often dies alone, in poverty and misery and maybe even suffering from insanity. This is what happens, I guess, when you separate yourself from nature, fact, truth, and reality, also from yourself and other people.

Marxists and Nazis of course have their own pseudosciences and their pseudoscientific processes and gadgets. Marxism is itself, in its whole, a pseudoscience, i.e., the pseudoscience of what Marxists calls History. And what else are the Marxist Workers' Paradise and the Nazi Thousand-Year Reich (a different Reich from Wilhelm) than just larger versions of those insular and closed-off places where Reich, Sadony, Hubbard, and men like them played with their pet theories and carried out their abstruse researches and pointless experiments? In contrast, Captain Nemo was only a fictional character. He was harmless. In contrast, too, Edgar Rice Burroughs was only a real-world author. All of his theorizing and experimentation happened only on paper. He was harmless, too. But maybe we can say that his Tarzana was the secular equivalent of those hidden and isolated places of pseudoscience and separation, a kind of Disneyland not open to the general public.

Marxism and the "science" of History, Nazism and the "science" of race, orgone energy, cloudbusting, Dianetics, Scientology, flying saucers, contact with aliens--including sexual contact with aliens--ancient aliens, alien abductions, alien invasions and infiltrations--on and on these ideas go. Some are mostly harmless. All are, at least in part, pseudoscientific. Among them are ideas, Marxism and Nazism being the chief examples, that are dangerous in the extreme, to the point of being lethal to countless millions of human beings. What does it say about us that we keep coming up with these things? That they keep coming back even though we chase them away over and over again? What does it say about us that we keep falling for them? Believing in them as keys to our understanding, of ourselves, our history, and the world in which we live? Believing them to be keys to making our lives better and happier? What do all of these things say about us?

Notes
(1) The article is "Marx of the Libido" by James Panero on the website of City Journal, Summer 2024, accessed by clicking here.
(2) From his essay "Politicizing the Sexual Problem of Youth" in Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934 (1972).
(3) I'm interested in the origins of the supposed bourgeois idea of the "emancipation of the heart." I found this phrase in an online abstract of a paper about the German authoress Marie Louise von François (1817-1893). I also found it in reference to both Rousseau and Goethe. I can't say whether I'm on the right track, though. Maybe if we could find a handsome prince to kiss the sleeping Lenin in his glass coffin, he would wake up and tell us what he meant.

Speaking of the Swiss and glass coffins, an American woman killed herself in Switzerland using a suicide coffin. This happened on September 23, 2024. See what I mean when I say that there are always more things waiting to come in the door? Anyway, last night (Sept. 24, 2024) I read "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut (1968). The story involves suicide parlors where people voluntarily go to their deaths. How prescient. There are also suicide chambers (pun possibly intended, given the author's surname) in "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers (1895) and in the film Soylent Green (1973), based on the 1966 novel by Harry Harrison. These ways of killing ourselves originated in science fiction. Now they have come into the real world. Is it possible for them to go back into science fiction again? Or is it too late for that?

Wilhelm Reich and son Peter, by the artist MacNeill, from High Times #9, May 1976. Note the flying saucers and the Vernian rocketship. Note also the two orbs as in Robert W. Chambers' illustration for his own King in Yellow (1895).

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Takings and Turnings

Some object to the supposition that Allison V. Harding was not a woman but a man, believing--rightly I should add--that the things that are women's should remain women's and not be taken from them. Yet every day in America, the things that are women's are being taken from them, most importantly the integrity of their bodies and of their sex, also their uniquely female experiences and identities. The things and places that are or should be women's are being taken from them, too. Women are now not always the victors in women's sports. Some sports records are held not by women but by men. Women and girls are no longer safe in women's restrooms, dressing rooms, changing rooms, shower rooms, and locker rooms. Men have entered women's prisons and women's shelters and have assaulted them there, sexually and otherwise. The takers in all of this are men, but they are being helped in many cases by women. Others who object are forced to remain silent, all that is, but the most powerful among them. Even then, these powerful women are vilified, and there are attempts to strip them of their power, to strip them even of their own creations. If we're looking for a case in which there are real attempts at silencing and erasing a woman writer and to take from her the things that she has created, look no further than that of J.K. Rowling. Men are doing that and women are helping them.

I have written before about the desire afoot in this world to destroy the past and everything that remains of the past. There is that negative goal to be sure, but I have overlooked the possibility that there could be a positive goal to replace it. The desire to destroy is a powerful one, but what comes after the destruction? The skilled destroyers among us can only wake up empty once they have done their work--either that or cast about for fresh, new things to destroy. The replacers, though, still have their goals and may pursue them through and past all of the destruction.

We have given up on God, and so there can be no spiritual transcendence. The yearning for transcendence remains, though, and so we replace spiritual transcendence with other kinds of attempted transitions, transferences, and transmutations. Ordinarily, we seek spiritual transcendence of the body and of our earthly experience because God and a purely spiritual existence lie on the other side. The replacers among us have decided that we are Gods--each one of us, capital-"G" Gods. We have usurped his role, believing we have his wisdom and authority, are confident that we can exert his power. We believe we can remake his world and his universe, of which we are a part. We believe we can remake ourselves in our own image. Whatever we can envision--whatever we might want of ourselves--we can become. We have become Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

Weird fiction has its limitations. For one, it tends to be told in the form of a tale: One time this weird thing happened when somehow I stepped outside the normal world and normal experience, but then I came back, or: I witnessed this weird thing that came into our universe but then went away again, but we should be on the lookout for that ever happening again. The weird tale--tale being the operative word--tends to be a premodern form. Science fiction, on the other hand, tends to more sophisticated and modernistic. And it takes place in the real, material world. It isn't weird. It's real and normal, logical and rational. Weird fiction is also a prewar genre. Once the world was awakened from a sometimes irrational past into a scientific and technological present of atomic bombs and rocketships, of the possibilities of apocalypse and dystopia, of alienation and all of the psychopathology of modern living, weird fiction lost much of its power. Science fiction became the alternative. Before the war there were monster movies. After the war, Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein. Meanwhile, science fiction came into the movies, and we had The War of the Worlds, This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There were weird-fictional monsters after the war--vampires and zombies for example--but these were often given scientific explanations, such as in The Last Man on Earth, Night of the Living Dead, and The Omega Man. Other weird tales were turned into types of horror, including body-horror (An American Werewolf in London) and the horror of the psychopathic killer, who was depicted as a supernatural or almost supernatural phenomenon, even if psychopathy is seen in our time as a scientific, medical, psychological, or sociological (i.e., a "soft"-scientific) problem. There were exceptions of course. I'm working here in generalizations.

Before the war there were serious authors who wrote weird fiction--their tales tended to be called "ghost stories"--but before the war there doesn't seem to have been any great discontinuity between serious literature and genre literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and still others wrote in those genres. Some authors of the American South before and after operated in what is called the "Southern Gothic" mode. After the war, though, serious literature turned away from weird fiction and ghost stories and towards science fiction. Again, there were exceptions. Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, and Joyce Carol Oates have worked in Gothic modes. But when turning to genre fiction for their subjects and themes, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Walker Percy, and others like them have chosen science fiction rather than weird fiction as their preferred mode. Put another way, science fiction is fiction, a higher and more literary form, versus weird fiction as a folk form, simpler form, or more popular form. Again, there are exceptions, H.P. Lovecraft being a notable example.

Still working in generalizations.

My point here is that we are living in and will continue to live in a science-fictional world and a science-fictional society. The real-world problems and threats confronting us are science-fictional, not weird-fictional: We have done away with the supernatural--or think we have done away with it--and have turned entirely towards the material and the scientific--or at least what we call the scientific. We face threats in the form of apocalypse and dystopia, but for now at least, the greater threats, I think, are our development of artificial intelligence, our turning towards robots and away from human beings, and perhaps greatest of all, our seeking to transcend ourselves as we were created towards something we believe we ourselves can create--or re-create. Again, we believe that we and the universe in which we find ourselves are flawed. And we believe ourselves capable--wise enough and powerful enough--to remake all of it. These attempts to correct our perceived flaws, to remake ourselves, to transcend ourselves, to remake the entire world and all of human nature--the belief that we can do these things--can be seen as a kind of gnosticism, if I understand the term and the concept correctly.

There are new gnostics--new progressives and new utopians--among us. Two of them were born in the 1930s--the last decade, by the way, in which weird fiction may still have stood above science fiction in popularity. These men, both from central Europe--a place of origin for so many twentieth-century horrors--don't have long for this earth. We can't rejoice that they will die, nor should we. That's not the point. The point is that they and everyone like them will die, and all of the grand ideas filling their heads will die with them. That's the fate of all of us, now and until the end of time. There is no escaping it. Our physical bodies are mortal. That's how we were made. We cannot transcend them, at least on our own and under our own power. We certainly can't transmute them. We cannot be anything other than what we are. It is essential that we all remember these things and hold them in our thoughts every day. 

The science-fictional idea is that we will progress into the future. The weird-fictional alternative might be that we are bound to ourselves and the world as we and it were created in a supernatural beginning and which continue to operate under supernatural auspices. We may try to escape those bounds, but our destiny or fate is either to return or to face the dire consequences of our transgressions. How many transgressive weird-fictional heroes and protagonists are punished or suffer these consequences in the end? Dr. Frankenstein is certainly one of them and may have been the first. His example is still with us. We should heed it.

Victor (an ironic name) Frankenstein tried to create a man where there was never before a man. Medical doctors today are trying to make men where there were never men and women where there were never women. Technologists would like to create beings out of machinery and souls where there were never before souls. These are things that simply can't be done. Women can never have the things that are men's. Beyond that, after their attempted transitions, they will never again have a chance at the things that are women's. They might as well try to get with child a mandrake root. But all women should remember that men in attempted transition may very well continue to have the things that are men's and take from women the things that are women's. Women in attempted transition give things up; men in attempted transition become takers. Remember that.

Trans- . . . that prefix . . . The word weird has to do with fate or destiny, but it also has to do with turning or becoming. To transgress, to transition, to transmute, to become transhuman, to pursue transference, to transcend--all are a kind of turning or becoming. But what things can we do strictly on our own, and what others will forever lie beyond our power? Transgression--our first sin--is a choice placed before us. Transcendence--offered to us so that we might live--is the alternative. All of these other things can only lead to earthly and bodily horrors.

And then maybe we will have a return to weird fiction.

In this cover for Mandrake the Magician, magic meets science--and wins!--but only by resorting to good old-fashioned fisticuffs. Note the Frankenstein-village setting of the Gothic romance juxtaposed with the flying saucers of science fiction. The monsters of science fiction have taken the place of those of weird fiction. Note, too, that the aliens and their ship (like a cupola) are entirely green.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley