Four Men-Part Four

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant is in two versions. The first version is a short story or tale published in 1886. The second is a long short story or novelette published in 1887. If you can, you should read these two versions together, even if the second version is fuller and, I would say, more important in the history of science fantasy and science fiction.

The first version is shorter, more objective, and more emotionally even. It takes the form of a first-person narrative within a third-person narrative, and so we're not completely immersed in the narrator's low or declining mental state. There is the very likely possibility that he's telling the truth about his experiences with an otherwise inexplicable invisible being. The situation, with its framing device set inside of a hospital, reminds me of the movie version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The second version of "The Horla" is longer and entirely subjective. The narrator is very slowly losing his mind, and by the end is ready to kill himself. His version takes the form of a series of diary entries. The diarist can be taken as an unreliable narrator. He may be merely insane rather than a witness to real but inexplicable events. Could Maupassant have gone into steep decline in between his composition of these two versions? Could he have been his own diarist/narrator?

A long time ago, I wrote about Fritz Leiber, Jr., and the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century. That problem is summarized in passages from Leiber's short story "The Hound," originally in Weird Tales in November 1942:

"We begin by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn't we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can't take root in the new environment."

* * * 

"The supernatural beings of a modern city? Sure, they'd be different from the ghosts of yesterday. Each culture creates its own ghosts."

In "The Horla," Maupassant anticipated the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century, for the new being of his title is a materialistic/scientific monster set to displace the supernatural monsters and ghosts of the past. At this point, I should say that "The Horla" is a very rich story, full of ideas and episodes, each with its own interest. It's a kitchen-sink kind of story, an attempt at a single explanation for seemingly many disparate things. Every fan of weird fiction should read it carefully, for it treats concepts of the supernatural past, the Nietzschean (and Darwinian) present, and the Fortean future, mostly directly and on full display now that we have had nearly a century and a half to read stories of this type. "The Horla" also anticipated H.G. Wells, and I wonder: was it the first alien invasion story in the history of science fiction?

In the two versions of "The Horla," the eponymous being is compared directly or indirectly to an incubus/succubus, a vampire, and a demon that takes possession of a man's life, mind, and activity. In the second version especially, "The Horla" presents a kind of unified-field theory of anomalous phenomena in that so many things that were formerly explained by supernatural means--incubi/succubi, night paralysis, vampires, demons, ghosts, poltergeists, and so on--now have a materialistic explanation, this for an age in which God has been proclaimed dead and the supernatural no longer has any power in our lives:

     We've always had a foreboding of him, for centuries we've dreaded him and announced his coming. Our forefathers were always haunted by fear of the Invisible.
     Now he has come.
     He was the true subject of all the old legends about fairies, gnomes and evil, elusive spirits in the air. He was sensed in advance by men who were already apprehensive and trembling. (First version, Bantam, 1994, p. 295)

Note the language of the Christian concept of the Second Coming and of a relief from anxiety, fear, and trembling--except that those feelings are not relieved but enforced by the coming of the Horla.

From the second version, in which the hypnotist Dr. Parent, obviously meant to represent a man of science, speaks from a position of supposed authority:

"Ever since man has thought, since he has felt himself close to a mystery which is impenetrable to his coarse and imperfect senses, and he endeavors to supplement the feeble penetration of his organs by the efforts of his intellect. As long as that intellect remained in its elementary stage, this intercourse with invisible spirits assumed forms which were commonplace though terrifying. Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature." (Random House, 1945, 1950, p. 33)

In "The Horla," God is dethroned first by science and materialism, and that clears the way for man to be dethroned from his place near the top of the great chain of being. Why should we enjoy any special status? Why should we not give way to this new superior being? For no reason at all.

There is much in "The Horla" for us to contemplate, definitely more than I can cover in a blog entry or two. I'll bring up two more concepts before getting to the main part of what I set out to say today. The first involves Friedrich Nietzsche . . .

I have read that if God is dead, then all that remains to drive human activity is the Nietzschean will to power. (The only other options, I guess, are nihilism and self-destruction, both of which were at work in Maupassant's work and life, as well as, ultimately, in that of Nietzsche.) I'm not a philosopher and don't understand philosophical ideas very well. All I can say is that there are exercises of will shown in "The Horla." An introduction to this concept is in the episode in which the diarist's cousin is hypnotized and her will coopted by her hypnotist. This taking-over of her will foreshadows that of the Horla's taking-over of the diarist's will later in the story. There seems to be a parallel made between possession by a supernatural being--a demon--and that of the materialistic/scientific Horla. In both instances, the possessed person loses his ability to exercise his will to a more powerful--or superior--being. We now recognize mesmerism as a pseudoscience, and so the force of Maupassant's idea is reduced in our time. But in his, mesmerism was perhaps seen as more potent scientifically and no doubt useful for his purposes. In any case, hypnotism or mesmerism was a way for him to treat the concept of a loss of will--or the Nietzschean concept of the will to power--to effect.

The second materialistic or scientific (or pseudoscientific) concept treated indirectly in "The Horla" is that of Darwinism, for the obvious point is that the Horla is more advanced than humanity in evolutionary terms: he has come, again, to displace us. In the first version, Dr. Marrande speaks as the narrator closes out his narrative:

"I don't know if this man is mad or we both are, or . . . or if our successor has really arrived." (p. 296)

In the second version, the diarist describes the Horla as man's "successor in this world." (p. 38) On August 19, he writes:

     Now I know. I can divine. The reign of man is over, and He has come. [. . .] Woe to us! Woe to man! He has come [. . .] the Horla--it is He--the Horla--He has come!--" (p. 39)

He continues:

     A new being! Why not? It was assuredly bound to come! Why should we be the last? We do not distinguish it, like all the others created before us? The reason is, its nature is more delicate, its body finer and more finished than ours. [. . .]
    There are only a few--so few--stages of development in this world, from the oyster up to the man. Why should there not be one more, when once that period is accomplished which separates the successive products one from the other?
     Why not one more? (p. 40)    

That, surely, is progress and evolution.

It's plain to me that the Horla is a being from another planet, from the stars. Some readers might see it differently. But I see "The Horla" as an alien invasion story, and perhaps the first of its type. H.G. Wells usually gets credit for writing the first or one of the first alien invasion stories in his scientific romance or seminal science fiction novel The War of the Worlds (1895; 1897). It's easy to see why "The Horla" would have slipped notice, for it is a far more subtle and less sensationalistic work. Again, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another far more subtle (and insidious) work, is closer in concept to "The Horla."

Finally, I would like to bring up Charles H. Fort, the youngest of the four men of the title. I have written a lot of about Fort. I see him as a seminal figure in science fiction as well. In thinking about man's place in the universe, Fort famously concluded:

"I think we're property."

(From The Book of the Damned, 1919, Chapter 12; see "Piecing Together Separated Things," from May 13, 2022.) That idea--that we are merely the property of superior beings, extraterrestrial in origin--has come down to us through all kinds of science fiction and science fantasy stories from the pulp era to the present. In fact, it's extremely prominent in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, published nigh on two years ago. Fort is credited as the originator of that idea, which also, as it so happens, forms the basis, I think, of the ancient astronaut hypothesis. But was Fort the originator? Or did it come from somewhere else? I'll answer my own questions, for it seems to have come from "The Horla." Very obviously from "The Horla," in both of its versions. From version one:

     What is it? Gentlemen, it's the being the earth has been awaiting, after man! He's come to dethrone us, subjugate us, tame us, perhaps to feed on us, as we feed on cattle and hogs. (pp. 294-295)

And from version two:

. . . but the Horla will make of man what man has made of the horse and of the ox: His chattel, His slave, and His food, by the mere power of his will. Woe to us! (p. 39)

So in the second passage, there is--as in the Cosmic Horror Issue--the combination of a Nietzschean idea--"the mere power of will"--and a Fortean one--we are "chattel."

(There are episodes involving mirrors and gazing into mirrors in "The Horla." I don't have those puzzled out, but I wonder if they could allude to the Nietzschean idea of gazing into abysses.)

As for the narrator/diarist in "The Horla," he finally puts together his ideas regarding the Horla by availing himself of what I have called the Fortean method. This is more overt in the first version than in the second, but it's present in both, for in both, the narrator/diarist discovers, like Fort, a newspaper account that provides an explanation for what has so afflicted him. In the first version, that account refers to "[a] kind of epidemic of madness" that has struck in Brazil, that is, attacks by "invisible vampires." These are obviously made by what the narrator has called the Horla. And he remembers that a Brazilian ship recently passed by his house near the Seine. Without the newspaper account, the attacks would remain an isolated mystery, perhaps an individual madness. But with it, they become real in the world, the account being all of the evidence needed that something strange is indeed going on here.

(The arrival of a vampire carried on board ship from another place reminds me of the plot of Dracula by Bram Stoker, published in 1897.)

So did Fort read Maupassant, specifically "The Horla"? I don't know. I didn't find entries on Maupassant in the indexes of either of my biographies of Fort (by Damon Knight and Jim Steinmeyer). Fort traveled in the Old World. Presumably he was exposed to Old World literature. But I guess these things will remain mysteries. In any case, I would say that "The Horla" was at least an early story to treat the problem of the supernatural past in the materialistic/scientific present; that it was one of the first if not the first alien invasion story; that it seems to have treated the Nietzschean concept of a will to power; that it also seems to have treated the Darwinian concept of man as just a link in an evolutionary chain reaching forever forward; that it predated the Fortean concept that we are merely the property of superior extraterrestrial intelligences; and that newspaper accounts and other documents can be used to explain what would otherwise remain disparate and unexplainable phenomena, and so in addition to science, we have journalism as an explainer.

So read "The Horla" and see what you can find in its pages.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part Three

God created the cosmos, thereby banishing the void and chaos that preceded it. For as long as God exists and reigns supreme, there can be no void, and nothing from the void can exist in or intrude upon the universe. All things are under God and there can be no horror emanating from anything in his Creation. All horrors must wait, lurking outside the circle of star-firelight that is the universe, like beasts from before time and history.

But "God is dead," or so proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in The Gay Science, published in 1882. So if God is dead, then there can be cosmic horror. He no longer stands as a bulwark against void and chaos. And like so many horrors, cosmic horror had to wait until the nineteenth century before it could emerge--or re-emerge--for God's position at the top of creation was forever secure and unassailable before then. His law was always supreme. Weird came back in the nineteenth century. (Weird is not a horror.) But maybe it is our little fit of foot-stamping--God is dead, we cry--that made horrors, both fictional and actual, possible in the twentieth. Remember that the most murderous regimes in human history have been atheistic.

It's useful, I think, to look at chronologies. Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead in 1882 (or recognized a belief among his fellows to that effect). That was very near the beginning of Guy de Maupassant's career as a published author. The first version of "The Horla" was published in October 1886. The second came along in 1887. Also in 1886, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Nietszche was published. (We would recognize the title as almost science-fictional.) In that book, Nietzsche wrote:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (From Chapter 4, No. 146)

If you think only in terms of genre fiction, then you might read that as predictive of stories of supernatural horror, weird fiction, and science fantasy of the coming century. We have Nietzsche's concept and stories of that type overtly in our own, in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023).

* * *

Nietzsche read Maupassant. In his autobiography, he wrote:

I do not see from what century of the past one could dredge up such inquisitive and at the same time such delicate psychologists as in contemporary Paris [. . .] to single out one of the strong race, a genuine Latin toward whom I am especially well disposed, Guy de Maupassant. (From Ecce Homo, "Why I Am So Clever," Chapter 3, in my Vintage edition, pages 243-244; Ecce Homo written in 1888 and published posthumously.)

I don't have a biography of Maupassant. Surprisingly, such a thing is hard to come by. So I don't know whether he ever read Nietzsche.

* * *

Nietzsche had a mental breakdown on January 3, 1889. He was institutionalized, I believe, that same month. In the in-between time, he wrote a number of letters to his friends. Most of these were signed "Dionysius." (Remember that the Nietzschean title character in "The Last Bonneville," by F. Paul Wilson is named Dwight, a name derived from Dionysius.) Nietzsche hung on until 1900 and died in Maupassant's (and Lovecraft's) birth month, August, also the same month in which the Horla becomes known to his hapless victim. (Twenty and five make twenty-five.) As for Maupassant, he had his breakdown almost exactly three years later, on January 2, 1892, when he tried to kill himself. He was committed to an asylum and died there in 1893. What is it about January?

* * *

Guy de Maupassant died of syphilis. There was a time when people thought that Nietzsche had died of the same thing. I guess that idea has gone by the wayside. H.P. Lovecraft's father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, also died of syphilis. He had a psychotic breakdown in April 1893 and died in 1898. Lovecraft's mother, Sarah Susan (Phillips) Lovecraft, also suffered from mental illness and was also committed to an institution. She died in 1921. So all three authors--Nietzsche, Maupassant, and Lovecraft--had mental illness in their lives, and all three died while quite young. The same things are true of Edgar Allan Poe who preceded them.

* * *

Before moving on to Part Four of this series, I will point out that Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) studied art in France. I'm not sure that anyone knows the exact dates, but I believe he returned to the United States in the period 1893 to 1894 or 1895. I don't think there's any doubt that Chambers read Maupassant. How could he have avoided it? And there are some similarities in their respective works, even if Lovecraft observed in his consideration of The King in Yellow (1895) what he called "a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by [George] Du Maurier's Trilby [first published in 1894]."

* * *

I had hoped to get more into "The Horla" in this part, but that will have to wait until next time.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part Two

I'll set aside Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft before bringing them up again. The four men of the title are:

• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900);

• French author Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893);

• American author Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933); and

• American author and gadfly of science Charles H. Fort (1874-1932).

Some of the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) allude to ideas from two of these men, Nietzsche and Fort. Now that I have read "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, I can draw him into this discussion, too, along with Robert W. Chambers.

Robert W. Chambers is mentioned by name in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Guy de Maupassant is not, except very indirectly, for in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, one of the videos watched by the main character during his solitary holiday binge is Diary of a Madman (1963), starring Vincent Price. Although it bears the title of one of Maupassant's stories, Diary of a Madman is mostly based on another, namely, "The Horla." Both stories take the form of diaries, and so it was easy, I guess, to put them together. If the moviemakers had entitled their film The Horla, no one would have known what it was about. Besides that, it probably wouldn't have gotten by the censors.

The main character in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" thinks a little about Vincent Price but not at all about Maupassant. Thematically, "The Horla" is related to Quatermass (1979), a show in which Mr. Cornell and his TV watcher are much more interested. The illustration at the beginning of the story is of John Mills' image on a TV screen, Mills being the star of the show. I don't know whether Mr. Cornell was aware of the thematic connection when he wrote his story. The idea that we are property, or cattle, seems to have come from Charles Fort. No one writing for the Cosmic Horror Issue seems to have looked to "The Horla" for inspiration. I think, though, that "The Horla" must be considered seminal in the history of science fiction. I'll get into that a little more. Right now I'll just say that I can't believe I had never read it before a couple of weeks ago. But then you can't read everything all at once. Where would that leave you?

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant was published in two versions, the first in the October 26, 1886, edition of the French newspaper Gil Blas, the second in a hardbound collection called The Horla, published in 1887. I have the first version in Pierre and Jean and Selected Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant (Bantam, 1994). I have the second and I guess definitive version in Selected Tales of Guy de Maupassant (Random House, 1945 and 1950), with illustrations by Adolf Dehn. Even so, this version is different from other translated versions. If you can, you should read these two versions together. I'll quote from them next time, or maybe the time after that if this brief series turns into a long one. By the way, "The Horla" was reprinted in Weird Tales in August 1926, in its author's birth month, as well as the same month that Maupassant's diarist first sees his previously invisible tormenter. 

Translator Charlotte Mandell has suggested that the portmanteau word horla is a combination of the French hors, meaning "outside," and là, meaning "there." The Horla, then, is "the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There," or "the 'what's out there'." (Quoted in Wikipedia.) That's an excellent interpretation, I think, and just another indication that we should always endeavor to look into the meanings of words. A simple English version of the word Horla might be alien, and I think that's what we are to believe about Maupassant's being, that it is an alien, probably an extraterrestrial alien.

H.P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Guy de Maupassant and Robert W. Chambers. Both are mentioned in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." Lovecraft especially liked "The Horla." It's supposed to have been an influence upon him in his composition of "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928). I can't say that that's true. It appears to be one of those things that people say so often that everyone just accepts it. We should have some evidence instead, and then we can believe it for sure. The influence of Chambers upon Lovecraft is more evident. In contrast, any connection to or awareness of Nietzsche in Lovecraft seems tenuous. As for Charles Fort, look no farther than "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1931) for Fort's name in Lovecraft's fiction.

All four men of my title read Poe, for Poe, once he arrived upon this earth, became inescapable. Here is Nietzsche in a discussion of Poe, and others:

     Those great poets, for example, men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol--I do not dare mention far greater names, but I mean them--are and must be men of the moment, sensual, absurd, fivefold, irresponsible, and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they must usually conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the vicinity of swamps--what torture are these great artists and all the so-called higher men for him who has guessed their true nature!

The quote is from Nietzsche contra Wagner: Out of the Files of a Psychologist (1888). A different version is in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886). So, like Maupassant, Nietzsche sometimes changed what he wrote.

To be continued . . .

An illustration for "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, source and artist unknown. This may be in an edition published by P.F. Collier & Son in 1910, although the almost unreadable words above appear to be in French.

Posted early and revised later in the morning on March 2, 2025. I have changed what I have written, too.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part One

Two figures cast their long shadows over the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. They are of course Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. But it seems to me that there is more of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort than Poe or Lovecraft in Weird Tales #367. From Nietzsche comes the theme and imagery of staring into voids and abysses. From Fort comes the idea that we are merely the property of superior beings from outer space. I think there is very little if anything of Robert W. Chambers in this issue, even if his name is mentioned first.

• In "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, a man stays at home at Christmastime to watch TV. (Fun fun.) Among the shows he watches is Quatermass, a British TV serial from 1979. As I understand it, the premise of the show is that people on Earth are being harvested by aliens for their protein. Human beings, then, are essentially cattle, in other words, property. (Cattle is from the same root word as chattel, i.e., the Latin capitale, meaning "property.") This is the Fortean aspect of Mr. Cornell's story. Now the Nietzschean aspect:

The door opens. He's opened it inward. And he's just looking at darkness. Just space. (p. 24)

I take that to be an oblique reference to a quote from Nietzsche:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (From Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Chapter 4, No. 146) (1886)

• The reference to Nietzsche is more direct in "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan:

I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me. (p. 38)

The reference to Fort is also more direct:

I think we're fished for. (p. 38)

It's also kind of indirect in that those italicized words refer to Edmond Hamilton's overtly Fortean story "The Space Visitors," from 1930.

• In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, the title character says that on his trip to the Moon, he:

"stared in the other direction at all that empty space out there. At the Void. And not only did the Void stare back, it spoke to me--or at least something within the Void spoke." (p. 53)

Here's the Fortean concept to go with the foregoing Nietzschean one:

"We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings."

Whose playthings? According to Bonneville, we are the playthings of "Our Owner." (p. 53) So, again, we're property.

There is an alien presence in "The Traveler" by Francisco Tignini, "Mozaika" by Nancy Kilpatrick, and "Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon, while the void appears right in the title of Carol Gyzander's story "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide." I can't say that any of these stories has both a Nietzschean and a Fortean aspect.

As for the other two stories, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, and "Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, Poe and Lovecraft have a more prominent place in the former, while Mr. Campbell's story is the most Lovecraftian of all. And if cosmic horror is a synonym of Lovecraftian horror, then "Concerto in Five Movements" is perhaps closer than any to the concept of cosmic horror.

The title of this little essay is "Four Men," but I have written about only two of the four. The other two will come along in part two of this series.

To be continued . . . 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Four

Kurtz would seem an enigma. Despite all of his words--the great flow of his words, written and spoken, issuing from his heart of darkness--he remains a mystery. His last words--"The horror! The horror!"--are ambiguous. Just what is it that he finds horrific? He would seem a psychopathic god, a forerunner to and prediction of the totalitarian rulers of the twentieth century, set to commence less than a year after part one of Heart of Darkness was published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February 1899.

Like those future rulers, Kurtz writes and speaks at great length and with great eloquence. Marlow reads from his writings, remembering:

"But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. [. . .] 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbound eloquence--of words--of burning noble words." (Dell, pp. 88-89)

And like the eloquence and burning intensity and power of twentieth-century totalitarian oratory, Kurtz's "pamphlet" ends with a call to action: "'Exterminate all the brutes!'" As Eric Hoffer observed in his book The True Believer, in every mass-movement revolution the man of words or ideas is succeeded by the man of action--and that's where the mass murder and mass extermination begin. Kurtz, sickly, weak, small in stature, a big fish inhabiting a small pond, is here the man of words but he is unable to carry out fully his prescribed actions. Instead death carries him away.

Kurtz's resorting to "will" made me think of another nineteenth-century author, one who may also have had Polish blood. Before Joseph Conrad wrote, so did Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically on what he called the "will to power." Conrad would seem to have been aware of the writings of Nietzsche. Maybe Kurtz is a kind of Nietzschean hero. Maybe his dissolution replays that of Nietzsche before him.

Nietzsche rears his head in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) in the form of his warning not to peer into the abyss. So are there abysses--and cosmic horror--in Heart of Darkness? That question comes next in this series.

To be continued . . .

Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer in a Signet edition. This is the edition that we read a long, long time ago in one of my English classes. I wish I still had it. Anyway, that's a representation of Kurtz on the cover. He looks harmless enough and not at all diabolical, unlike a real-life bearded and baldheaded totalitarian from the century following his. 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part One

Francis Paul Wilson was born on May 17, 1946, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is a writer of science fiction, horror, and weird fiction. He has also worked in television, and some of his works have been adapted to that medium and the medium of film. His novel The Keep, from 1981, was adapted for theatrical release in 1983. It was also adapted to a board game and a role-playing game. In 2006, Mr. Wilson wrote the script for a comic book adaptation. Jonathan Maberry, current editor of Weird Tales, used Mr. Wilson's character Repairman Jack in his own series novel Cave 13, published in 2023. So there is still the same pattern: the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue are friends of the editor, they are involved in TV and movies, and they write for comic books.

* * *

The short story "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson follows his essay "Abrahamic vs. Cosmic Horror." There is a full-page illustration enclosing the main title followed by six solid pages of text. Thank goodness for some solid content.

I have been writing about brandnames used in fiction. Now here comes one driving right into the title of Mr. Wilson's story. That's okay, I think. America is a country of cars and roads. If we could translate that word--America--it might mean "a nation of people on the road, on the move." Many of our cultural works have been about cars and driving and being on the road. I won't list any. You'll think of plenty on your own. I'll just add that I had a chance to buy a Bonneville once. I wish I had done it.

"The Last Bonneville" is a third-person narrative. That seems to me significant, for the two other major works so far in this issue, "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell and "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, are told in the first person and are, I think, somewhat autobiographical. Remember that the worm ouroboros, inverted and turned in upon itself, is rolling through the Cosmic Horror Issue. This story is told from a different point of view.

There are more brandnames and proper nouns in "The Last Bonneville," just as in previous stories: Maserati Ghibli, Elon Musk (a maker of both cars and rockets), Apollo Eight and its three astronauts, Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Two Kennedys, a Nixon, and another victim of an assassin's bullet, Martin Luther King. (Two out of the four of them sent men to the Moon. One of them went to the mountaintop.) There will be more. There will also be several meta-references. In other words, "The Last Bonneville" does not stand alone in its storytelling.

There are two characters in "The Last Bonneville." One is Felix De Groot, who drives a Maserati and works as a rocket scientist, an occupation that approaches that of the physicist in "Night Fishing." The other is a crazy guy named Bonneville who drives a Bonneville. De Groot picks up Bonneville on the road. They talk as De Groot drives.

(Felix De Groot by the way means "happy" and "the great." He's about to be taken down a few notches in both categories. Bonneville's first name is Dwight, which is a pagan name referring to the pagan god Dionysus. His given name connects him to the Ancient Greek origins of science fiction, if Jack Williamson is right about these things. It also connects him to the chaotic aspect of the Dionysian. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the dichotomy between Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos. You are about to read another reference to Apollo, in three . . . two . . . one . . .)

Bonneville claims to have gone around the Moon on Apollo Eight. He is evidently an atheist. He calls it "ignorant and anti-science" to believe in God and the Creation. (The other day on this blog I was called ignorant by an anonymous believer in an anti-science belief system. Anonymous might be an atheist. He certainly believes that human beings can be gods and that we can create ourselves. He and his co-religionists should leave well enough alone and let God do his stuff.) While the other astronauts were reading from the Book of Genesis for all the world to hear--it was Christmastime after all--Bonneville

"stared in the other direction at all that empty space out there. At the Void. And not only did the Void stare back, it spoke to me--or at least something within the Void spoke." (p. 53)

So here they are again in Mr. Wilson's story: the Void and the allusion to Nietzsche.

Bonneville was going to blow up Apollo because he thought we should be quarantined on Earth (not realizing, I guess, that the idea of a quarantined Earth came from a thoroughgoing believer in God, C.S. Lewis). But the Void told him there isn't any reason to keep the people of Earth quarantined: "We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings." Whose playthings? Those of "Our Owner." (p. 53)

And now Charles Fort makes his return appearance, after his first in "Night Fishing." Nietzsche and Fort, together again at last.

Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas," there is a Christmastime theme. And like "Night Fishing," "The Last Bonneville" is a pretty full story, even if it's pretty short. There is talk of the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, the "Wow!" Signal, the BLC-1 Signal. Brandnames come back, but the author makes a mistake by calling a Bonneville an Olds. It's actually a Pontiac. There is also mention of AirPods, an Apple product. Do these authors get kickbacks for dropping names in their stories? If he's waiting for a check from Pontiac, Mr. Wilson shouldn't hold his breath.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Two

The narrator in "Night Fishing" has a cosmic horror problem. We get a hint of that in the first column of the story as it appears in Weird Tales #367:

There's a hallway that seems a lot longer than it can possibly be.

Dread stretches time and space.

Time and space being the dimensions and scales in which cosmic horror operates.

Telling about night fishing with his grandfather, the narrator relates to his psychiatrist: "We'd just drift around out there on the lake, the stars wheeling overhead--I swear there were more stars in the sky when I was a kid. I look up now at night, and it's like something came along and ate most of them." Remember the image of the zero: a gaping maw. Remember the consuming, engulfing void: now an eater of stars.

Instead of using an epigraph, the author of this story, Caitlín R. Kiernan, quotes from other works within its main body. These include a traditional song called "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" and the poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas, which also has imagery of the sea. (Another variation on a theme in the Cosmic Horror Issue.) There is also an allusion to a story by a long-ago teller of weird tales, paraphrased from an idea by an author before him.

Read on . . .

In Mr. Kiernan's story, there are these words in italics, which he uses to connote quotations from other works:

I think we're fished for.

Right away, I recognized that as an idea originally in The Book of the Damned (1919), the first of Charles Fort's four books on strange and anomalous phenomena. In Chapter 12 of that book, Fort concluded: "I think we're property," meaning, we are the property of races alien to Earth. This, I think, could very well have been the origin of the ancient astronauts hypothesis so popular today. And it's one of the two main themes I have identified in the Cosmic Horror Issue, or one of two main sources of these feelings of cosmic horror about which its authors write. We have this vast cosmos in which to work and yet they have come up with only two sources of horror at our apprehension of it. At least Mr. Kiernan put these things together in interesting ways, even if they are, again, meta-references.

Eleven years after The Book of the Damned was published, author Edmond Hamilton had a story called "The Space Visitors" in Air Wonder Stories. The date was March 1930. His story was reprinted in Startling Stories in September 1939, the month in which the Second World War began. Hamilton's story is a Fortean story--or a storified plot really--of a visitation made by aliens to Earth. (Storified is my new word. There were lots of storified plots in the early years of science fiction.) The aliens' purpose is unknown except that they seem to be studying us. Their study is, however, extremely destructive and heedless of human life and pain. In the story, a Dr. Jason Howard, of Gotham University no less, theorizes on the matter at hand:

Did we live at the bottom of an ocean, an atmospheric sea? Were we merely crawling things upon earth's surface, to be fished for and examined curiously by unimaginable beings and vessels far above?

Emphasis added. As in the Cosmic Horror Issue, there is imagery here of the sea. And coincidentally or not, Hamilton's second banana to Dr. Howard has the same surname, Ransome vs. Ransom, as C.S. Lewis' hero in his Space Trilogy of 1938-1945.

Soon after the allusion to an allusion to Charles Fort, there is an allusion to another, earlier figure. The narrator of "Night Fishing" has purchased a box containing some objects from an estate sale. Unfortunately, these objects--or is it just one self-transforming artifact?--have strange properties. He wonders about it. Then he writes:

     I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me.

And now Friedrich Nietzsche rears his head, for in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), he wrote:

     Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Emphasis added again. This aphorism is from Chapter 4, being all of No. 146. In my Vintage edition of 1966, it appears on page 89. Nietzsche wrote a prelude to a philosophy of the future. Remember that the protagonist in The Incredible Shrinking Man saw himself as a possible man of the future.

And so we have that word again, abyss, roughly equivalent to void, and the condition of chaos that preceded God's speaking Cosmos into existence. Abyss is also in the imagery of the sea, as in the scientific term abyssal zone, or that layer that is among the deepest in the ocean. The word abyss is also in "Dagon" by H.P. Lovecraft, one of the earliest stories--if not the earliest--in Weird Tales (Oct. 1923) that has in it cosmic scales and cosmic scope. It's also in "The Call of Cthulhu," which appeared in "The Ghost Table" Issue of Weird Tales in February 1928. Both usages are in regards to the depths of the sea. Dagon is from the sea, but Cthulhu is from the stars.

So, from Charles Fort comes the idea that there are aliens among or above us, who own us, prey upon us, or are fishing for us, and from Friedrich Nietzsche comes the image of the abyss as not just emptiness but something that is watching us, waiting for an opening through which it might gain access to our world.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The Eleventh Hour

This is a year of two anniversaries divisible by one hundred years each. Two hundred years ago, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, in which a man (or semi-man) is assembled from corpses, came out in an edition of 500 copies. One hundred years ago today, at this hour (my local time), the Great War, in which millions of men had been reduced to corpses, came to an end. Both were momentous events. One was a work of art, thus of life and creation. The other was a great and horrifying work of death and destruction. In 1818 and 1918, these were recognized as opposites: life and death, creation and destruction. On a much smaller scale, both had a great influence on the evolution of fantasy and weird fiction. Some people consider Frankenstein to be the first novel of science fiction. From it and similar books--books more properly called romances--came tales by British and American authors, chiefly Edgar Allan Poe, that led to weird fiction. And it is from Edgar Allan Poe that Weird Tales, no doubt named for a collection of his works published in the 1890s, is descended. But would there have been Weird Tales without the Great War? It's impossible to say. But in that war, horror, death, mutilation, and destruction met and in some ways became allied with art. I have recently read a book that makes that claim at least, and I have a hard time seeing that its author was wrong.

The book is called Art and Fear. The author was Paul Virilio, who was still living when I read it a couple of months ago but who has since died, on--of all days--September 10, 2018, the day before an anniversary of mass death and horror could revisit the world. (1) Art and Fear is a slim volume, published in 2006 by Continuum of London. It consists of two essays drawn from talks given by M. Virilio. Here I'll consider the first, "A Pitiless Art."

Four years ago, I wrote a series called "What is the monster of the twenty-first century?" My conclusion was that the zombie, representing mass man, in other words, all of humanity in our mass age, is that monster. Lately, though, I have seen signs that the zombie is fading. For example, we're already into the last season of The Walking Dead (supposedly), and it looks like zombies are going to lose their main television venue. Sorry, zombies. I have also seen signs that another monster for the twenty-first century could be on the horizon. Some people think that Artificial Intelligence (AI) or robots armed with AI will turn against us and seek to destroy us. Maybe. But maybe AI is a red herring. Maybe the next monster will be inclusive of AI but be something else instead.

Maybe the new monster of the twenty-first century will be the transhuman, or, perhaps more accurately, the man who makes him.

Whether it will be or not, Paul Virilio foresaw the coming of the transhuman and the maker of the transhuman in the monstrousness and horrors of the twentieth century, a century in which terror, murder, mutilation, and mass dehumanization of men became like artistic expressions, one in which science and the arts fused in the creation of new ways of representing the human form, not in stone or clay, not on canvas or paper, but in the murdered corpse, the dissected, mutilated, or vivisected body, and in the genetically altered human being himself.

In his essay, Virilio invoked Nietzsche, but he seems to have dated our drive towards teratogenesis to the Great War:

At the dawn of industrial modernity, Baudelaire declared, 'I am the wound and the knife.' How can we fail to see that, in the wake of the hecatomb of the Great War, when Braque and Otto Dix found themselves on opposite sides of the trenches in the mud of the Somme, modern art for its part forgot about the wound and concentrated on the knife--the bayonet--with the likes of Oskar Kokoschka, 'the scalpel-wielding artist', before moving on through the German Expressionism of Der Sturm to the Viennese Actionism of Rudolph Schwarzkogler and his cohorts in the 1960s . . .

ART MAUDIT or Artist Maudit? What can you say, meanwhile, about the likes of Richard Hülsenbeck, one of the founding fathers of Dada, who told a Berlin audience in 1918, at a conference on the new trends in art, 'We were for the war. Dada today is still for the war. Life should hurt. There is not enough cruelty!' The rest is history. (p. 16)

And so we have had a century not only of cruelty but also of terror, mass murder, self-destruction, dehumanization, and mutilation of the human form and the human person, much of it the hands of scientists (or pseudoscientists) operating beyond any previously observed or acknowledged limits. They are men without pity, practitioners of one of the pitiless arts of Virilio's title. They were and are technological giants but ethical pygmies, maybe even ethical amoebas.

Seven years after the war ended, the French-Jewish art dealer René Gimpel, who would go on to perish in a Nazi concentration camp, wrote in his diary:

The new German painting, naturally, represents current sensibility in Germany and it really frightens me. The Ancients invented and represented the world of witches, but the world of Hate is a modern invention, the invention of Germany, spread out over the canvas. The demons of gothic pictures are child's play when it comes to the human, or, rather, inhuman, heads of a humanity bent on destruction. Furious, murderous, demoniacal heads not in the style of the old masters but in completely modern manner: scientific, choking with poison gas. They would like to carve the Germans of tomorrow out of fresh meat . . . (p. 18)

This is a key insight, I think, for as Gimpel saw so keenly, Hate--a new and special kind of hate--is an invention of modernity, more specifically, a materialistic and thoroughly scientified modernity, one that has replaced God with countless minor gods. "The demons of gothic pictures," as Gimpel put it, "are child's play." The gothic, the supernatural, the romantic, the traditional, the folkloric--all have been overtaken and left in the dust by modernity. This was the greater problem for humanity in the twentieth century, a far lesser one for weird fiction. I have written before about this problem and how one teller of weird tales, Fritz Leiber, Jr., tried to deal with it.

Germans may have been first to sicken from this new disease of modernity--they were after all closest to the source of infection (2)--but the disease has spread throughout the world:

This is how Rothko put it: 'I studied the figure. Only reluctantly did I realize it didn't correspond to my needs. Using human representation, for me, meant mutilating it.' (p. 20)

Rothko killed himself in 1970, "exercising," Virilio wrote, "the most nihilistic of freedoms of expression: that of SELF-DESTRUCTION." (p. 21) In that, Rothko recapitulated other suicides by other artists and prefigured the suicides of many more to come.

Virilio continues:

As far as contemporary science and biology go, doubt is no longer an option, for genetics is on the way to becoming an art, a transgenic art, a culture of the embryo to purely performative ends, just as the eugenicists of the beginning of the twentieth century hoped. When Nietzsche decided that 'moral judgements, like all religious judgements, belong to ignorance', he flung the door to the laboratories of terror wide open. (p. 26)

* * *

The expressionism of a MONSTER, born of the labour of a science deliberately deprived of a conscience . . . As though, thanks to the progress of genetics, teratology had suddenly become the SUMMUM of BIOLOGY and the oddball the new form of genius only, not a literary or artistic genius anymore, but a GENETIC GENIUS. (pp. 26-27)

* * *

Sir Francis Galton, the unredeemed eugenicist, is back in the land of his cousin Darwin: freedom of aesthetic expression now knows no bounds. Not only is everything from now on 'possible'. It is 'inevitable'! 

Thanks to the genetic bomb [analogous to the atomic bomb in physics], the science of biology has become a major art only, an EXTREME ART. (p. 29)

* * *

Confronted by such 'expressionist' events [i.e., genocide in the late twentieth century], surely we can see what comes next, looming over us as it is: an officially terrorist art preaching suicide and self-mutilation thereby extending the current infatuation with scarring and piercing. Or else random slaughter, the coming of a THANATOPHILIA that would revive the now forgotten fascist slogan: VIVA LA MUERTA! (pp. 30-31)

* * *

Thanatophilia, necro-technology and one day soon, teratology . . . Is this genetic trance still a science, some new alchemy, or is it an extreme art? (p. 31)

* * *

Where will it end, this impiety of art, of the arts and crafts of this 'transfiguration' that not only fulfills the dreams of the German Expressionists but also those of the Futurists, those 'hate-makers' whose destructiveness Hans Magnus Enzensberger has dissected. (p. 34)

Where will it end? I suspect it won't, as "end" requires limit. There are and will be no limits in men who lack all moral and ethical sense. And so, as Mary Shelley foresaw two hundred years ago, as the men who lived through the Great War foresaw a century ago, and as Paul Virilio foresaw at the beginning of the current century, we will have things among us that cross boundaries, between man and animal, between man and machine, between man and monster. These will be transhuman. But will they be the real monsters among us, or will that role be played by the men who create them? Who in Frankenstein was the real monster, the creature or the creator?

* * *

The problem of transhumanism goes deeper than that, though. If we say that the transhuman or the creator of the transhuman is the monster, we remove the problem from ourselves. We are absolved. We can say to ourselves, Those people over there are monsters. But not us. We are good. Remember Virilio's premonition: "[S]urely we can see what comes next [. . .] an officially terrorist art preaching suicide and self-mutilation thereby extending the current infatuation with scarring and piercing. Or else random slaughter, the coming of a THANATOPHILIA [. . . .]" The signs are all around us. We are full of hatred, each for himself, all for all, all for humanity, for human history, culture, society, and civilization. And because of those hatreds we rush to negate ourselves, mutilate ourselves, destroy ourselves, or else commit murder, mass murder if we can, but murder nonetheless. We can point fingers and say that the transhuman or the men who will create him will be monsters, but what will stop us from rushing to those same creators, begging them to mutilate us, transform us, turn us into monsters, anything so that we might be something other than what we are in this hated thing? Are we not attempting transhumanism ourselves? And if the transhuman is a monster, what does that make us?

* * *

Paul Virilio did not mention Frankenstein in his essay, yet by strange coincidences, the connections are made in this year of a centennial, a bicentennial, and his passing from the earth. I am an artist. I can tell you that what Virilio described among artists is an actuality. I have seen so much hatred, violence, cruelty, nihilism, and destruction in the work of artists I have encountered. There isn't any question in my mind that they hate not only themselves but also life, God, the world, and the rest of humanity. Not knowing what they are or hating what they are, they engage in the everyday self-mutilations of tattooing, piercing, and scarring. And now we have people having their bodies surgically altered. Anything, they seem to be saying. Give us anything so that we don't have to be what we are. These things are the drip, drip, drip of suicide and self-destruction. If they could, these artists might very well commit murder. Short of actual killing, they commit murder in their art. It is an art of extreme cruelty, extreme violence, extreme destruction. Artists once provided warnings against such things. They were human, not anti-human. Artists and thinkers operating within limits foresaw that the transhuman and his extreme-scientist/extreme-artist creator, operating without limits or beyond limits, would prove monstrous. But then, in the twentieth century, the artist joined the scientist and the war-maker as one of a class of destroyers. Those who lived and operated within limits, before limits were destroyed, may have failed to see that we might all wish to be monsters, but we will be. Unless we draw back, unless we recognize limits, unless we say no to death and destruction and yes to life and creation.

Notes

(1) The translator's preface to Art and Fear, by Julie Rose begins: "Immediately after September 11--an event that did not take him by surprise--people who had always dismissed Virilio as a pessimist started plaguing him for interviews." (p. vii)

(2) And they're still carrying on quite well, despite their sickness, on their march to self-destruction and the destruction of Europe.

The Wounded Soldier by Otto Dix, 1917.

An illustration for Frankenstein by the American artist Lynd Ward (1905-1985).

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Secret Origins of the Superhero-Part Five

Every superhero has his secret identity. With Superman, it's Clark Kent. (Or is the other way around?) (1) Superheroes also have their unique costumes, secret hideaways, props, trappings, and supporting characters, including their love interests. Many of these conventions of the superhero genre come from other genres, some of which are as old as time. It's impossible now to uncover the origins of many of them, but secret identity is a specific phrase that lends itself to a search. I've done that, and I have an early occurrence of the phrase secret identity, again from the 1890s.

1890-The Earliest Use of Secret Identity

The earliest use I have found of secret identity is actually from a piece of serialized fiction called King or Knave?, written by Robert Edward Francillon (1841-1919) and published in various newspapers in the 1890s, perhaps beginning with the Manchester Weekly Times and Examiner of Manchester, England. The quote below is from the installment of January 11, 1890, page 10. In Francillon's story, a doctor and a young woman named Cynthia have met on a train. They begin discussing some people they know in common. Then their conversation takes a turn:

A dreadful pang shot through the doctor's heart. Could anybody else have discovered the secret identity and be trading on it? He made his last remark to see how it was taken. If she did know the secret, it was incredible that she should have played with it before a stranger--unless, indeed, she were playing some very deep game [. . .].

There were more secret identities in newspapers from 1890 to about 1940 or so, but it was only after Superman came along that the phrase became a part of common currency, including in professional wrestling. (Professional wrestlers, along with rock stars, might be the closest thing we have in real life to costumed superheroes.)

1912-The Earliest Use of Supervillain

Last to arrive on the scene was supervillain. The earliest use I have found of that term is from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 10, 1912, page 7. The article, "Guardsmen Are to Repeat War Drama Triumph," is a review of a stage play called Held by the Enemy. "War dramas," wrote the reviewer, "require two things--a heroine of emotional type and a super-villain." (What about a hero?) In this instance, Mrs. Horace Applegate played the former. Major Dick Gruner, playing Surgeon-General Fielding, filled the latter role, making him perhaps the first supervillain so named in our popular culture. I have another use from about the same time, from the Vicksburg Herald for April 13, 1915, page 5. This, too, was a review, for a "five part photodrama" called Money. From the first paragraph:

"A Million Dollars for a Banquet"--that is the amount of money spent [. . .] by the super-villain of the story, John D. Maximillian, otherwise known as Croesus, who has made himself the Money-Power of the World.

So it looks like Maximillian as a supervillain possesses the superpower of money--he is "the Money-Power of the World."

It's interesting that the supervillain came to popular culture (i.e., pulp fiction and comic books) from popular culture (i.e., melodrama and cinema). In other words, the super- prefix seems to have attached itself to the supervillain not because of his association with the Nietzschian Superman but because of the general usage of that prefix during the first decade or two of the twentieth century. (2) American movies, as a more or less conventional, middle-class, heavily sentimentalized, even moralistic medium, had superheroes and needed counterbalancing supervillains as their foils. In short, the supervillain seems to have been an invention strictly of American popular culture. 

In summary, the words superhero, superheroine, superman, superwoman, superpower, secret identity, and supervillain were all in use well before the 1930s. (3) It only took science fiction and fantasy, and then, ultimately, comic books, to turn these words into what we understand them to mean today. And that happened in the 1930s, mostly because of Superman.

* * *

Postscript: In writing this series, I have thought about Slan, by A.E. van Vogt (1946), and other science fiction stories. The idea of the superior man is vast and deep in genre fiction; a simple blog just isn't big enough for the exploration. Instead I'll say that, although the concept of the Superman--and super-ness--seems to have come from Nietzsche, it found its natural home only in America, in the land of tall tales, hype, and boosterism. When it arrived here, we did with it what we do best: we a) commercialized it, and b) turned it into popular culture. Super-ness went from being a serious and abstruse philosophical concept to one taken up by ordinary men and women, mostly in the popular press. You could say that the concept became--"Horrors!" Nietzsche might exclaim--democratized. In the process, the Nietzschean Superman, an idea perhaps too serious for its own good, was punctured and became deflated, only to be replaced by the democratic Superman, who fights for truth, justice, and the American way.

As it turns out, the pretender or aspirer to super-ness is more often a small man than a great one--a small man living among the masses, either in a democracy or as part of a mass movement. He is decidedly not an aristocrat or a man above men. I'm not sure that we have had a true Nietzschean Superman since the philosopher first came up with the idea. In fact, the advent of the Nietzschean Superman may very well be an impossibility. (God always has the last laugh.) On the contrary, the desire to be above the rest of humanity holds a special appeal to small men rather than big, and they can't seem to resist it. More often than not, they choose a political--especially a politico-racial--means for attempting super-ness. The recent synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh, the recent mail bomber in Florida, the castor-bean-mailer in Utah, the black-church shooter in South Carolina--these are all good examples of small men trying to be big, and necessarily failing. Lee Harvey Oswald is another example. So is the shooter in Las Vegas, who, significantly, fired on masses of people from above. To him they must have seemed like ants (or worms, in Zarathustra's formulation). All or most of the high-ranking Nazis were like that, too: small men--freaks, perverts, deviants, misfits, outcasts, losers--all trying to be big.

Unfortunately, the same kind of thing was and is sometimes at work in science fiction, especially in early science-fiction fandom. Those early fans were physically unattractive, awkward, inept at ordinary living, etc., yet some were convinced that their superior brains and vast knowledge of science, fitted to what was sure to be a better, more technologically advanced future, would make them big. In creating Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster may have been acting out a kind of fantasy--their fantasy--of achieving bigness and greatness--his bigness and greatness. But they seem to have come up with an innovation: they converted the Nietzschean Superman into a force for good rather than one for himself and his own greatness. In that way, they took the Nietzschean Superman away from the Nazis and other pretenders so well and so thoroughly that when we think of the Superman today, we think only of the DC version, not the Nazi or Nietzsche version. What a powerful thing they did! The Allies may have destroyed the Nazis, but Siegel and Shuster, two Jewish kids from Cleveland, destroyed the Nazis' physical, racial, and political ideal by wresting it from them forever.

Next: A Return to Weird Tales.

Notes

(1) And both Clark Kent and Superman may have had secret identities in their creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. Through Clark Kent, with his double English name (English occupation, clark, and English place name, Kent) and his Middle American origins, they might pass, I guess, as WASPS. And through Superman, they might pass as big, strong, powerful men rather than as ordinary Jewish urbanites. All of this (and my postscript) ignores the possibility that Clark Kent is the real identity of Superman and not the other way around. The evidence for that? Clark Kent wants Lois Lane to love him for himself rather than for what he is as Superman. Recent moviemakers have ruined the story of Superman by getting rid of the love triangle that is at its heart. They do, however, tell and retell (and retell) Superman's origin story, which is part Moses and part Jesus, or at least part Messiah.

(2) Like Magneto, Nietzsche might have found the idea of hero or villain, or hero vs. villain, to be nonsensical. It's no villain (or "reprobate," as in a quote on this blog from a few weeks ago) who strives to become the Nietzschean Superman.

(3) Super-villainess actually came last, in a review of Shadow Hall by John Paul Seabrooke, quoted in the London Observer, May 15, 1927, page 9: "Full of thrills. What a gang of villains is here led by a super villainess."

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley