The Curse of Tut-Ankh-Amen

The first story by Donald Edward Keyhoe in Weird Tales was "The Grim Passenger," published in April 1925, one hundred years before I began writing this series. My move and other events have intervened. That one-hundred year anniversary isn't so timely now. But I'll complete this series today.

"The Grim Passenger" is a story of Egypt and mummies. It begins with a reference to "the opening of the tomb of King Tut-Ankh-Amen," which took place in February 1923 but was still pretty fresh in the minds of the reading public two years later. Weird Tales had had plenty of content related to Egypt, pyramids, pharaohs, mummies, and King Tut-Ankh-Amen, most notably in its first-anniversary issue of May-June-July 1924. There would be more.

Keyhoe's story is one of a curse. Its author was clever enough to connect the idea of an ancient Egyptian curse to a more recent historical event. I won't give away his twist ending. There are those who believe in what they call the Curse of King Tut. Still there are those who believe these things. Even as late as the one-hundred-year anniversary issue of Weird Tales, published in 2023, there seems to have been belief, this expressed in Tim Lebbon's story "Laid to Rest." I will quote a newspaper article from one hundred years before: "It is really remarkable that otherwise intelligent persons should give credence to stories of this character [. . .] ." And yet they do. (Source: "Spirits and Lord Carnarvon," in The (San Francisco) Recorder, April 7, 1923, page 6.)

The concept of an ancient Egyptian curse visited upon those who disturb ancient tombs and graves is an old one. Like so much in our popular culture, it appears to date from the nineteenth century. The originators of the living mummy and a mummy's curse appear to have been three women, plus an anonymous author. They were Jane C. Loudon, Jane G. Austin, Louisa May Alcott, and, of course, Anonymous. You can read more about that on Wikipedia, the website that knows everything, including many things the rest of us know as lies.

There is a pharaonic curse in the work of another author. He was H. Rider Haggard. In Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmarchis (1889), Haggard wrote of how Harmarchis robs the tomb of the pharaoh Men-kau-ra and how "the 'Ka,' or the spirit of the dead Pharaoh, brought about the degradation and death of both Harmarchis and Cleopatra for their impious deed." (Same source as the above quote.) In February 1923, Haggard in fact protested against "desecrating the tombs at Luxor," asking, "'What would England think if the great dead in Westminster Abbey were exhumed and treated this way?'" (Source: "H. Rider Haggard Flays Desecration," in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 20, 1923, page 2.) Haggard is about to come up again.

The idea that there is a Curse of King Tut seems to have originated with the sickness and death of Lord Carnarvon, who had financed the explorations at the tomb of Tutankhamen. The first use of that phrase--"the Curse of King Tut"--that I have found in an American newspaper is from March 20, 1923. Lord Carnarvon had fallen ill the previous day from an infected mosquito bite. He died on April 5, 1923, in Cairo, and his body was returned to his native land for burial. I feel certain it has remained undisturbed since then. In any case, "the Curse of King Tut" and Weird Tales magazine are, as you can see, of the same vintage, for both got their start in March 1923. I don't know who came up with the idea of the curse. The newspaper article, shown below, is unsigned. But its anonymous author wrote it as if Haggard were in his place, and I find that noteworthy. It's also fascinating to realize that the writing lives of the early Weird Tales authors overlapped with that of H. Rider Haggard.

"The Curse of King Tut! Egyptians Insist Avenger Has Struck Invader of Tomb." From The Cleveland Press, March 20, 1923, page 1. The author is anonymous, but the art is signed. Unfortunately, I can't read the artist's last name, only his first--Paul. The account reads like a weird tale, and the illustration of a man in a pith helmet and jodhpurs, fleeing from a giant insect, could easily have appeared in "The Unique Magazine" of the 1920s.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Ten

Utopia: Ideal & Idyllic

In the 'teens and 'twenties, Edgar Rice Burroughs busied himself with writing and seemingly every future author of science fiction stories read and loved his Mars books. In addition, seemingly everyone then writing science fiction emulated Burroughs and his creations. I will write more on that topic in a future part of this seemingly interminable series. Maybe for now we can take all of this as a given: Burroughs wrote what we can now call science fiction in its then-contemporary form, and his Mars books became the model for the planetary or interplanetary romance, a sub-genre of the not-yet properly named whole genre of science fiction. (If science fiction is in fact a proper name for it now.)

* * *

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has so many interesting things to say, including these two:

The lost-race story [what I have been calling Lost Worlds] is obviously an opportunity for the setting up of imaginary Utopias [q.v.] and Dystopias [q.v.] [. . .]. (p. 736)

It has been suggested, too, that such stories allow exercises in imaginary cultural anthropology [. . .]. (p. 736)

Then the encyclopedists take it back--the way I took things back last time I wrote--pointing out that Lost World utopias and dystopias "are not as common as might be expected" and that in actuality most Lost Worlds stories "are quite straightforward romantic adventures." (p. 736) That seems right to me. I think of Utopia as a progressive or forward-looking genre in which plot and action are secondary to more satiric, intellectual, or high-literary purposes, all fit for publication in a fine hardbound edition and suited for academic or scholarly study. In contrast, the Lost Worlds/science fantasy-type story seems to me more conservative, romantic, and adventurous, essentially a pulp genre meant for popular consumption. Its aims seem simpler. They would appear non-intellectual and even anti-intellectual: Nobody ever accused Edgar Rice Burroughs of being an intellectual, but in our hyper-intellectualized age (which began, I think, in the 1960s and '70s), Burroughs has become a subject for the same kind of academic or scholarly study previously reserved for more literary works. (1)

* * *

The science fiction encyclopedists also write that, in regards to the Lost Worlds genre,

there is more and better cultural anthropology in offworld stories of planetary exploration and colonization of other worlds [q.v.] (mostly postwar), subgenres that largely superseded the lost-race story, than there are in lost-race stories set on earth. [Emphasis added.] (p. 736)

A lot of science fiction history is packed into that little phrase, "subgenres that largely superseded the lost-race story," for it implies that a big part of science fiction came out of the Lost Worlds/science fantasy tradition established by H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. That seems right to me, too. If it involves other planets--worlds lost and newly discovered--explorations and odysseys--mysteries and journeys through and in time and space--then it seems likely to have come down to us from the science-fantasy adventures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (The dystopian and apocalyptic strain of science fiction would appear to have had different origins. That's another topic still to come in this series.) Burroughs in particular seems to have been an originator of the science-fictional (and utopian) hero, which might have been a new type when he wrote but was based on a far older one, as old as the heroes of ancient Greece. More on that soon, too.

* * *

Here is the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on Utopias:

It can be argued that all utopias are sf, in that they are exercises in hypothetical sociology [q.v.] and political science. Alternatively, it might be argued that only those utopias which embody some notion of scientific advancement qualify as sf--the latter view is in keeping with most definitions of sf [q.v.]. Frank Manuel, in Utopias and Utopian Thought (anth 1966), argues that a significant shift in utopian thought took place when writers changed from talking about a better place (eutopia) to talking about a better time (euchronia), under the influence of notions of historical and social progress. When this happened, utopias ceased to be imaginary constructions with which contemporary society might be compared, and began to be speculative statements about real future possibilities. It seems sensible to regard this as the point at which utopian literature acquired a character conceptually similar to that of sf. (p. 1260)

That's a long quote, almost long enough for its own blog entry, but it gets to a point, which is that categories seemingly fail and definitions lose their precision as time goes by. Utopia by Thomas More, from 1516, is a Utopia. But is Burroughs' Barsoom, first in print in 1912, also a Utopia? An even larger question: Is science fiction of the twentieth century essentially utopian? Or, can we turn it all around and argue that all Utopias are science fiction, as the encyclopedists suggest in their use of the very passive voice? Maybe Charles Fort's concept of continuity in all things applies: science fantasy, planetary and interplanetary romance, and science fiction as a whole are pulp versions of the damned: "By the damned, I mean the excluded," Fort wrote in 1919, shortly after John Carter projected himself to another planet. And that's how I think of the pulp genres: for decades they were excluded, beneath consideration, beneath contempt, not a part of polite society or worthy of academic study, discontinuous with accepted literature. People might have called pulp magazines rags, but in one sense they weren't rags at all, for rag paper is for finely made books and meant to last. Pulps were for the moment, to be read and discarded, to be found again in the trash or on the train, like Jessica Soames' copy of True Story. Printed on acid paper, they were cheap, designed for decay, meant not to last at all. But in them--perhaps now more than then--are lost and decaying worlds and races, all ready for rediscovery, like Haggard's lost valley of Kukuanaland or Burroughs' decaying world of Barsoom. But the pulp genres did and still do lie along a continuum, or more accurately exist in a medium in which all touch and intermingle with all, in which all boundaries are lost. Lost Worlds are Utopia is science fiction is speculative fiction is literary fiction and so on and on . . .

* * * 

It seems to me that in his Lost Worlds stories, of which the Mars books are just one iteration, Burroughs didn't actually write utopian fiction. I think that the definition of Utopia is--like Jabba the Hutt--too broad and flabby. I think that, properly speaking, a utopian story is one concerning a perfect or idealized society. (2) A mere fantasy--even in the form of a Lost Worlds story or some exploration of cultural anthropology--isn't really utopian, for if it is, then all of high fantasy and about half of science fiction is subsumed into Utopia (instead of the other way around). If a word can mean anything, then doesn't it really mean nothing at all? Anyway, in writing their stories of Lost Worlds and cultural explorations, these authors seem pretty clearly not to have had utopian aims. I don't think we should put those aims on them. Instead, I think we should keep our definitions narrow and admit that there are far fewer utopian stories than what some theorists would have us believe. Nonetheless, Utopia seems to have passed into science fiction by way of Lost Worlds and science fantasy . . .

To be continued . . . 

Notes

(1) Witness "Utopia in the Pulps: The Apocalyptic Pastoralism of Edgar Rice Burroughs" by Michael Orth in Extrapolation, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1986.

(2) It's worth noting here that ideal and idyll are from the same root, meaning "form" or "appearance," more remotely "to know" or "to see." So, Utopia = ideal society, and Lost Worlds ≈ idyllic society.

European languages make a distinction we don't make very well in American English: to us, all book-length works of fiction are called novels. I like the European way: novels are realistic, while romances are fanciful. Here's another linguistic twist: in German, science fiction and utopian stories are tied to each other in the use of the words utopische, utopischen, utopischer, and so on. (I know nothing about the German language, only the words that I see in this place or that.) Here is an example, the cover of Insula by Paul Eugen Sieg (1899-1950), subtitled "Utopischer Roman," presumably "utopian romance," or maybe, loosely, "science fiction novel." Published in 1953, Insula is about a secret volcanic island--a kind of Lost World--inhabited by a scientist living in a secret city, like Captain Nemo or Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Sieg had previously written other science fiction novels, including Detatom (1936), at the core of which is a journey to Mars and the discovery of "remnants of a technically superior high culture."

The German firm Pabel published hundreds of entries in its Utopia Großband series between 1954 and 1963. Here is the cover of No. 58, from October 21, 1957, featuring a novelization of the American film 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), written by Henry Slesar (1927-2002). The artist was Wolfgang Blaar. 

I picked this cover because of its great art, done by Ed Valigursky (1926-2009), and not knowing that the original story, by Andre Norton (1912-2005), is called Secret of the Lost Race. I guess there's no getting away from the idea that Utopia-Lost Worlds-Science Fiction is an unbreakable nexus. (Utopia Großband No. 126, May 31, 1960.)

Pabel also published Utopia Zukunftsroman, or "Utopia Future Fiction" (I guess). The dates were 1953 to 1968. Here is the cover for the last issue, No. 596 from August 30, 1968, with a cover story originally entitled Objectif Tamax and written by the French science fiction writer Peter Randa (1911-1979). The identity of the cover artist is unknown.

Finally in this series of covers, that of Utopia Zukunftsroman No. 547 with a cover story, originally "The Programmed People," by Jack Sharkey (1931-1992) and cover art by R.S. Lonati (Rudolf Sieber [1924-1990]). This issue is dated August 25, 1967.

My reason for showing these covers is to show also that connections of which we might not be aware once existed and may still exist in other languages and cultures. Thanks to Hlafbrot for pointing out to me the utopian-science fiction connection that exists in Germany.

A final image, one that I have just discovered, "The People in Today's State" versus "The People in the Future State," a German-Romantic vision from 1904 by Friedrich Eduard Bilz (1842-1922). (That's his self-portrait in the middle.) So, above, examples of the Zukunfstroman, a story of the future, or science fiction; and below, an image of Zukunftstaat, the State of the future, or Utopia, in this case an idyllic or pastoral Utopia with imagery that could have appeared--and did appear--on the cover of Weird Tales a generation later, drawn by another German artist, C.C. Senf (1873-1949). (See especially the woman in pink on the center right of the page.) I'll say it again: What every romantic and idealist fails to see is that every Utopia is also a Dystopia, for we are not perfect, we cannot be made perfect, and we will not be harried into perfection nor used as soulless and inhuman building blocks in the construction of someone else's vision of a perfect human society.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A Swipe Along the Way

I have been reading and writing about H. Rider Haggard. Along the way, I have discovered an obvious swipe. The first image below is of the cover of Ayesha: The Return of She in a 1977 edition from Newcastle Publishing. The artist was Tony Yamada. Below that is Mr. Yamada's inspiration, Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David, from 1801. The mound of bones and skulls may also be a swipe, from Frank Frazetta, probably the all-time champion swipee (and occasional swiper), from his cover for the Lancer book Conan the Adventurer. (Click here to see that image.)

Today, March 15, 2021, is the eighty-fourth anniversary of the death of H.P. Lovecraft. May his mind now correlate all of its contents, and in doing that, may he and it rest in peace.

Note: I could not find a good scan of the cover of Ayesha: The Return of She. I have instead modified this image from a photograph.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Six

Burroughs & Haggard

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago on September 1, 1875, into an old and well-connected family in America. His father was a businessman and during the Civil War a brevet major in the Union Army. Burroughs the younger was related to at least seven signers of the Declaration of Independence, including John Adams. His two greatest literary creations, Lord Greystoke, better known as Tarzan of the Apes, and Captain John Carter, Warlord of Mars, were aristocrats of an old English or Southern type. If in reading all of this and more you were to conclude that Burroughs and his family were conservative, you would be right. His conservatism will come into play a little later in this series.

Although he grew up to be a man of action--he was actually beforehand a boy of action--Burroughs liked to read in his youth, and he possessed a vivid imagination. In that way and probably many others, he differed from his father. "My father was always very stern and military in our relationship," he wrote. "He used to tell me with increasing frequentness--until I was thirty-six--that I would always be a failure, and until I was thirty-six he was right." (1)

I'm not sure that there is a comprehensive record of what Burroughs read as a child or young man. We know that he read Roman mythology as well as The Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), for he admitted to being inspired or influenced--at least at some level--by those two sources in his creation of Tarzan. It's less certain that he read the works of H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925). I wonder, though, how could he not have? Haggard was one of the most popular and widely read authors of the nineteenth century. His novel She: A History of Adventure (1887) impressed, even astonished, reviewers and critics. It has never gone out of print and has sold in excess of 83 million copies since its initial publication. So did Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Lost Worlds on both Earth and Mars, read H. Rider Haggard, the great popularizer of that genre, or not?

In his biography The Big Swingers (1967), Robert W. Fenton made a case based on circumstantial evidence that Burroughs was indeed influenced by Haggard, particularly by She. (p. 62n) Haggard was a source of inspiration for Kipling. We know that much, for Kipling acknowledged in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), that he had read and remembered Haggard's Nada the Lily (1892) before beginning his own Jungle Books (1894). So, first came Nada the Lily, then The Jungle Books, and finally, maybe, the creation of Tarzan. But is that a direct and irrefutable line of descent?

Robert W. Fenton made his case, but he wasn't the only one. Richard A. Lupoff did it, too, in Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (revised edition, 1968). The late Mr. Lupoff even included a family tree showing some of Tarzan's possible ancestors, and these include Nada the Lily. He went further in his speculations, though, in the process making another strong circumstantial case that Burroughs was influenced by Haggard. Both Fenton and Lupoff drew parallels between Haggard's She and two of Burroughs' Tarzan adventures, The Return of Tarzan (1913) and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916, 1918). (2) But neither was able to pull off a Perry Mason-like revelation in the courtroom of his own well-researched pages.

In 1975, Irwin Porges published a hefty tome called Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. (3) His book is heavy on primary sources. In the preface is a photograph of Porges in a Raiders of the Lost Ark-like warehouse in Tarzana, packed to the ceiling with file boxes from Burroughs' long life and career. So you read for a while and then there it is, on page 130: in a letter to The Bristol Times (of Bristol, England), dated February 13, 1931, Burroughs wrote: "To Mr. Kipling as to Mr. Haggard I owe a debt of gratitude for having stimulated my youthful imagination and this I gladly acknowledge," adding, "but Mr. Wells I have never read and consequently his stories of Mars could not have influenced me in any way."

Interesting. My two-fold thesis is holding up. On one side are Utopia, Lost Worlds fantasy, H. Rider Haggard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. On the other are Dystopia, science fiction, H.G. Wells, and myriad writers who came after him, including, perhaps, H.P. Lovecraft. The parts that don't seem to fit yet are also twofold: Utopia as an expression of a conservative worldview, and, conversely, Dystopia as an expression of progressivism. I might have those parts figured out, though, so stay tuned.

Anyway, there's one more thing to consider in regards to Burroughs and Haggard. She: A History of Adventure was published in book form in the United States in 1887, I think in June. (4) That summer, She was serialized in American newspapers. Towards the end of summer, on September 1, 1887, Edgar Rice Burroughs turned twelve years old. We think of twelve as the the Golden Age of Science Fiction, but before it was that, it must have been a Golden Age of Adventure, too. We can imagine a young Burroughs reading She, perhaps as he lay abed at night, thrilling at the adventure and romance of it and dreaming that he might have such adventures, too--that he might even one day himself become a writer.

To be continued . . . 

Notes
(1) Quoted in The Big Swingers: A Biography by Robert W. Fenton (1967), p. 11.
(2) See Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure by Richard A. Lupoff (New York: Ace Books, revised edition, 1968), pp. 225-229, 300-301.
(3) For more on Irwin Porges and his family, see my article "Who Was Arthur Pendragon?" from January 25, 2019, here.
(4) On May 28, 1887, the Chicago Tribune announced the publication of She for the following month. Burroughs was still living in Chicago at the time, with his parents. On July 3, 1890, when he was fourteen, his father shipped him off to his brothers' ranch in Idaho so that he might avoid getting caught up in an epidemic.

Here and below are a few illustrations of H. Rider Haggard's She that you might not have seen before. First, the cover of a British edition published by Hodder. I don't know the year or the artist. (Note the similarity between this cover and the cover of Les Baxter's movie-score album for Barbarian, here.)

Here's a comic book version from 1950 with cover art by Henry Carl Kiefer (1890-1957).

Here's another version for children, published by the Arthur Westbrook Company of Cleveland, Ohio. I don't know the year, but by the style of the art, I would guess this was pre-World War II, perhaps from the 1920s or '30s. I don't know the name of the artist here, either.

This is the cover for the Pyramid paperback edition of 1966. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database doesn't give an artist's name, but it kind of looks like the work of Bob Abbett (1926-2015).

Finally, another edition published by Hodder, this one from 1971 with a title character I assume made to look like Ursula Andress, star of the 1965 film version. Again, there isn't any credit given for the artist. I mentioned phallic imagery the other day. Here is an example of what you might call its vulvic counterpart.

Original text and captions copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Five

The Utopia of Lost Worlds & the Lost Worlds of Europe

A long article to last for a while . . .

Utopia literally means "not a place," alternatively "no place" or "nowhere." (1) It has never existed and can't exist except in the imagination, but it's where the imagination goes from time to time. In attempting to bring about Utopia, the political imagination has instead created horrors. (We may soon see a bit of that for ourselves.) It is only in the literary imagination that Utopia truly lives.

The original Utopia, created by Thomas More (1478-1535), is an island, discovered in a world then and now called new. The twenty-first century reader of genre fiction might recognize More's Utopia and places like it as Lost Worlds. For decades--for a century or more--authors set their adventures in these places--in worlds that are at once lost and new--and the satirical and high-literary ambitions of the original utopian chroniclers gave way to romantic and adventurous popular fiction. As the known world grew and the unknown shrank away, Lost Worlds became a place to wander not for the reasoning mind but for the adventuring heart.

It seems to me that Lost Worlds are those that are lost in any civilized age. An escape from civilization seems to be a key element in the Lost Worlds story. I'm not the first to reach that kind of conclusion. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (update, 1995), does these things a lot better than I do. Here is that source on the British author H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925):

With his third and fourth novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and the even more successful She: A History of Adventure [1886-1887] HRH was catapulted to fame [. . .]. These novels of anthropological sf remain his most famous; they established a pattern he would follow for the rest of his career. That pattern might best be described as a central model for Edgar Rice Burroughs and the science-fantasy subgenre whose popularity attended the latter's revival in the 1960s: it is a pattern in which realistic portraits of the contemporary world (in HRH's case South Africa) are combined with backward-looking displacements (in his case invoking Lost Worlds, immortality and reincarnation) to give a general effect of deep nostalgia. [Emphasis added.] (pp. 531-532)

And again:

Not all of these books [the Allan Quatermain books] could be described as science fantasy, but all project that sense of desiderium--the longing for that which is lost--that lies at the heart of true science fantasy [. . .]. [Emphasis again added.] (p. 532)

Part of that bears repeating for the reader of Weird Tales: "the longing for that which is lost [. . .] lies at the heart of true science fantasy." 

For the first two or three centuries, utopian stories tended to be progressive, yet still geographic: Utopia is now, but it is somewhere else on Earth. In the progressive-minded nineteenth century, utopian stories, in association with progress then being made in the sciences, were cast into the future: Utopia is not in the now on Earth, but in the will-be or might-be of the future, either here or on other worlds.

At the same time all of that progress was going on, there was also a conservative or nostalgic reaction. Men wanted to hold on to the Lost Worlds of the past even as they disappeared. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there were Gothic and Romantic reactions to Reason and Neoclassicism. In the late nineteenth century, there were Lost Worlds fantasies and romantic, medieval, anti-technological Utopias. The Pre-Raphaelite artists and members of the British Arts and Crafts movement wanted to turn back the clock. So did American makers of utopian communities. In the late 1800s there were Dystopias, too, a new genre, originally known, I think, as anti-utopias. Reaction was literally in the word itself. These tended to be written by conservatives, such as the American Anna Bowman Dodd (1858-1929).

So it looks like in the nineteenth century, conservative-minded people looked backward with pangs of nostalgia. (Again, Edward Bellamy's title is ironic.) The past was being lost--whole worlds were being lost. The future--especially a scientific and technological future--must have looked to them like a nightmare-in-the-making. Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" (published in 1867), in which the "Sea of Faith" has long since retreated, comes to mind. Here is the famous closing stanza:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In his book Conservatism (Van Nostrand, 1956), Peter Viereck had Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) as a conservative. In reading about him now, I wonder whether Arnold was indeed conservative and whether "Dover Beach" might actually be an ironic poem, again on the subject of nostalgia and a yearning for the Lost Worlds of the past.

When Utopia migrated from a place somewhere on the current Earth into the imagined future, it entered into the realm of science fiction, a genre that tends towards progressivism, as opposed to science fantasy--weird fiction, too--which is nostalgic or backward-looking, as The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes. There it stayed for a while, but maybe only for a while. "Utopian thought in the last half century" observes the Encyclopedia, "has to a large extent disassociated itself with the idea of progress; we most commonly encounter it in connection with the idea of a 'historical retreat' to a way of simpler life [sic]." It adds: "Even the recent past has been restored by the momentum of nostalgia almost to the status of a utopia [. . .]." (p. 1261) It was no coincidence (or at least I don't think it was) that the two most recent of the works offered as examples, Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach (1975) and Time and Again by Jack Finney (1970), were published in the 1970s, when some people--older writers and fans, I think--feared that science fiction was dying. Maybe what was dying was the old progressive, utopian brand of science fiction, the supremely confident, outward-bound Gernsbackian and Campbellian brand of the 1920s through the 1930s and '40s. I think I'll have more on that later. Meanwhile, I will refer you once again to "The Gernsback Continuum" by William Gibson, published in 1981, just three years before his landmark Gothic science fiction novel Neuromancer came out.

* * *

Things were being lost, worlds were being lost, and with them possibilities, too. Here's another thing that was no coincidence (or at least I don't think it was): a conservative, nostalgic, romantic, or anti-science, anti-technology, anti-civilization reaction came along at about the same time that the conservation movement began in America. (Conservative and conservation are from the same root after all.) Yellowstone National Park, the world's first, was established in 1872. King Solomon's Mines was published in 1885. The National Geographic Society was founded in 1888. (2) Percival Lowell (1855-1916) discovered Lost Worlds on Mars in the 1890s and early 1900s, and novelist Edwin Lester Arnold (1857-1935) sent his new Gulliver there in 1905. The first national wildlife refuge was already two years old by then. The establishment of the first national monument followed in 1906. In between, several prominent Americans and one prominent Norwegian got together to form the Explorers Club of New York (1904). (3) Then, in 1912, both John Carter of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes made their debut. I sense that all of these were efforts to discover, explore, conserve, and ultimately escape into places in danger of being lost in one way, and appealing because they were already lost in another. I sense that many, if not all, were exercises in nostalgia.

I have one more type of Lost Worlds to enter into this gazetteer: the Lost Worlds of Europe. When I was a teenager, I read King Solomon's Mines again and again. The only rival to it in my reading was The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (1863-1933). Published in 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda was the original Ruritanian romance. Scads more followed, including the Graustark novels of my fellow Hoosier, George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1928). The Lost Worlds of Europe became pretty prominent in weird fiction and fantasy. I guess I could write a whole article or series of articles on them. I would have to do a lot of research first, though. I invite readers to send in their own examples or lists, especially from the pages of Weird Tales. That kind of research could help build the case that Lost Worlds, descended from Utopia, are a more conservative or nostalgic genre, thus one suited to the traditional, conservative, or backward-looking genres of weird fiction and fantasy.

Anyway, the Lost Worlds of Europe are also prominent in movies, from Frankenstein (1931) to Brigadoon (1954) to The Mouse That Roared (1959) to The Last Valley (1971) to The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Mission: Impossible (1966-1973) is full of fictional countries, many of them in Europe. Seemingly every one has a Rollin Hand lookalike as its dictator or generalissimo. Shades of Rudolf Rassendyll. In The Prisoner (1967)--no Zenda--a different kind of prisoner, called Number 6, is held in a miniature European Lost World, which also happens to be a Dystopia. He has a doppelgänger, too. You'll find out who it is in the last episode. (4) The Lady Vanishes (1938), begins in a Ruritanian country. In that film, Michael Redgrave plays a kind of ethnomusicologist, like Alan Lomax, recording the works of the worst and most forgettable folk culture in Europe before it is lost. (5, 6) He had better hurry. The members of that family seem to be the last practitioners of it, although there is an insurance commercial playing right now with perhaps a related family and culture living upstairs, joyously and tirelessly clogging away . . . 

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) "Nowhere," thus the anagram in the title of Erewhon: or, Over the Range, a Lost Worlds novel (or romance) written by Samuel Butler (1835-1902) and published in 1872.

(2) The first issue of National Geographic magazine was dated September 22, 1888, and for more than a century things went pretty well, I guess. Then, in January 2017, National Geographic jumped the woke shark and began trading in gnostic and anti-scientific claptrap. According to Wikipedia, the Walt Disney Company has, since 2019, owned a "controlling interest in the magazine." What Disney has done to Star Wars and Marvel can only be done to National Geographic, too. I think Disney owns the John Carter and Tarzan franchises as well. It's probably just a matter of time before John and Jane swap sexes and names.

(3) Cryptozoology, an investigation into the fauna of Lost Worlds, dates from that period as well. Antoon Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943) is considered its founder with his book The Great Sea Serpent, published in 1892.

(4) So would the sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda be called Return to Zenda? You know, a lowly British postal employee has to deliver some packages to Ruritania, only to discover that he is the spitting image of the King . . .

(5) That's Lomax, not Lorax. The Lorax was another famous conservationist. (Alan Lomax knew of a Utopia, too. It's called "The Big Rock Candy Mountains.")

(6) The opening sequences in The Lady Vanishes try a little too hard to be funny. It doesn't work very well for me. I sense a kind of mean-spiritedness in some of it, a peculiar brand of snobbery and disdain for people of supposed lower classes or what used to be called "races." George Barr McCutcheon did the same kind of thing in Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne (1901). Holding people up for ridicule because of their perceived low status is kind of a cheap way towards humor. Writers should work a little harder and use a little more imagination. (This is coming from someone who just sprang two puns on you.)

The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope was published in 1894. This illustration I think is from 1895 and is signed Hooper. Maybe that was the British engraver and illustrator William Harcourt Hooper (1834-1912), who worked in old forms. To that point: there is nothing new under the sun until there is. Although The Prisoner of Zenda was the first of a new genre, the Ruritanian romance, it received an old treatment in this illustration: the dark, creaky Gothic castle from the previous century once again looms over the European landscape.

William Harcourt Hooper worked with William Morris (1834-1896) of the Arts and Crafts movement. Among his other works, Morris wrote News from Nowhere, a utopian story (1890), and The Well at the World's End, a famous fantasy (1896). Morris was also a socialist, further evidence that a link exists between socialism and utopian thinking in general, and a backward-looking, nostalgic kind of reactionary conservatism. Put another way, the Socialist wants a return to the Middle Ages and stasis, to a stable and ordered society in which there are masses of immobile serfs below, a permanent, select, and élite aristocracy above (of which he, of course, is a member, if not leader), and no ambitious, energetic, grasping, usurping bourgeoisie in between.

In 1896, Parker Brothers came out with a Prisoner of Zenda board game. Here the castle is white and the scene sunny and bright. Maybe this is the castle of the good guys, while the previous one is Black Michael's. Anyway, we might think of merchandising and multimedia marketing campaigns as twentieth century, but here is an example of both from the nineteenth. My contention is that the elements of our current popular culture date from 1895-1896 (some from a couple of years earlier). Here is another piece of evidence for that. Stratego, another board game (though of the twentieth century) has a Ruritanian look to it, too, but I think that's because both Stratego and The Prisoner of Zenda were drawn from the essentially Ruritanian imagery of the real-life, nineteenth-century Europe of Napoleon, Metternich, Bismarck, and so on. Most of that came crashing down, I think, in and with the Great War.

It's at once comic and tragic to look at photographs of military men of the old Europe taken in the 1920s and '30s: here are relict grand, sculpted moustaches; bright plumes and cockades and cordons; brass buttons, fringed epaulets, and braided piping--here are airs of dignity, rectitude, and pride; things and ideas and ways that can no longer survive in the postwar world, originating as they have in the world that has been lost if not destroyed outright in the apocalypse of the trenches. It seems to me that in the nineteenth century the military uniform, especially the officer's uniform, still had its trappings of a proud and confident aristocracy. In the twentieth, it became democratic, and the officer in the field came to look just like his men. Herman Melville's phrase "the Dark Ages of Democracy" comes to mind.

Here's a nice painted cover of the Classics Illustrated comic book version. Unfortunately, the artist did not sign his or her work.

Lastly, a paperback edition by Magnum with a classic 1960s-1970s men's magazine-type cover. This isn't the edition I had when I was a kid, but I did have the Magnum edition of King Solomon's Mines, with a cover perhaps by the same artist. I think these are from the 1970s. (No, that is not a green light saber.)

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Four

Utopia Into Lost Worlds

One of the problems with stories of Utopia and Dystopia is that their authors often spend so much time describing their imaginary societies that they forget to tell a story. When I was in high school, I read Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887. I don't remember very much about it except that I didn't think it was very interesting--a lot of description and no action. Nearly six years ago, I read the yin to Bellamy's yang in the form of The Republic of the Future by Anna Bowman Dodd. I found her book more interesting but only in an intellectual or political-historical way. Like Looking Backward, it doesn't really tell a story. Even George Orwell's 1984, which is a more conventional kind of novel, includes long passages describing the nightmarish society of the future, long quotes from a fictitious book by the equally fictitious Emmanuel Goldstein, and even a closing essay by Orwell on Newspeak, the language of the future (which unfortunately approaches our present). It's almost like the very dark flip side of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, a kind of anthropological or ethnological examination of a carefully constructed society, complete with a discussion of linguistics.

For readers of genre fiction, part of the problem with stories of Utopia and Dystopia is that they often serve as vehicles for satire or philosophical speculation rather than for purposes of storytelling. That's one argument against classifying utopian and dystopian stories as science fiction and fantasy. I don't know about you, but I don't think 1984 or Brave New World or Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, sits very easily in either of these categories. Even We, with its rocketship and its glassed-in towers and its curative surgical operation, is more satirical than it is science-fictional. In other words, it's not meant merely to entertain. On the other hand, if a writer of science fiction or fantasy can fit Utopia/Dystopia into a larger bit of storytelling, it can work and genre readers might not really object. For example, screenwriter and producer Dave Filoni recently set an episode of The Mandalorian on a brilliantly imagined dystopian planet. Outside the city walls on Corvus is a burned-out hellscape, like a smoking battlefield from the Great War. Inside is a dim, gray, concrete nightmare, the place where the proles and the peasants live and are oppressed and tortured by their overlords. At the core of the city, behind yet more walls, is the pleasant, green garden of its tyrant, who is eventually, thankfully, brought down. This is one of my favorite episodes of the series, not only for its visuals and overall aesthetic but also because it resonates in the real world in which we today find ourselves, one in which our rulers live in comfort and splendor while we are punished simply for wanting to live our lives in peace and freedom. I don't think Mr. Filoni intended it, but "The Jedi," otherwise a bit of entertainment, also acts as a kind of commentary on our current situation--as a bitter satire and well within the dystopian tradition.

* * *

It seems to me that Utopia and Dystopia each has its own related and more popular subgenre. It probably had to be that way if Utopia and Dystopia, which are at their hearts philosophical and high-literary forms, were going to make their way into popular fiction. For Utopia, the chief subgenre is the Lost Worlds story. I'll let The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (update, 1995) , describe it:

This rubric covers lost races, lost cities, lost lands: all the enclaves of mystery in a rapidly shrinking world that featured so largely in the sf of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This subgenre was obviously a successor to the fantastic voyages [q.v.] of the 18th century and earlier, but there are important distinctions to be drawn. The earlier tales had belonged to a world which was geographically "open" [. . . .]. The lost-world story, however, belonged to a cartographically "closed" world [. . .]. (pp. 734-735)

(The Internet Speculative Fiction Database uses the tag "lost race.")

Not all Lost Worlds stories are utopian. I would guess that most aren't. King Solomon's Mines by H. Ride Haggard (1885), another novel I read--and loved--as a teenager, is a perfect example of that. (Unlike Looking Backward, a novel of about the same vintage, it actually tells a story, and an exciting one at that.) But if the Garden of Eden is Utopia, then it is surely lost. Like the tyrant's garden in "The Jedi," it is closed to us, secreted forever behind unbreachable walls (but only because we wanted it that way). Plato's ideal city-state is also lost, and his opposing Atlantis has disappeared forever under the waves. Subsequently unreachable, both have proved fertile ground in which to set stories of Utopia and Lost Worlds. (What else is Looking Backward but a description of an ideal republic?) Thomas More's Utopia, which could exist as a real place only in a "geographically 'open'" world, disappeared in a puff of smoke once the whole surface of the earth was mapped. It was only as the geographic world--and possibility--was closing that the Lost Worlds story reached its heyday. Maybe we realized what was really being lost and wanted to snatch some of the romance and adventure and pleasure from it before it was gone forever. In any case, the world closed. Yes, there were twentieth-century stories of this kind set in Africa (Thun'da by Gardner Fox and Frank Frazetta), the Amazon (The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle), Antarctica (Dian of the Lost Land by Edison Marshall), the South Seas (King Kong), the North Polar region (Island at the Top of the World by Ian Cameron), and even inside of a Hollow Earth (The Warlord by Mike Grell). But as the nineteenth century slid into the twentieth, stories of Utopia and Lost Worlds--if they were to be more plausible--would have to be set either in Time, as in Looking Backward (published at about the same time that the American frontier closed), or in Space . . .

And that's where Edgar Rice Burroughs came in.

To be continued . . . 

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1828) by Thomas Cole (1801-1848), an American artist of the Hudson River School. In his painting, Cole emphasized landscape; the figures here are diminished, dwarfed by Creation, disgraced and humiliated by their actions. On the right is Paradise--the only Utopia possible on Earth, possible precisely because it was created by God. Note that it is surrounded by a high wall of seemingly impassable mountains: the lost valley ringed by impassable mountains became a theme in the Lost Worlds subgenre of fantasy and science fiction. Two quick examples: the comic-book version of Cave Girl by Gardner F. Fox and Bob Powell, and The Last Valley, a not-quite-fantasy film from 1971. And on the left? What we might call a dystopian landscape for a still rural or agrarian America. Mass living--urban, industrialized living--which makes Dystopia plausible, had not yet set in when Cole executed his painting. But replace the dead trees and craggy cliffs with a gray and decrepit cityscape and the smoke and fire of the erupting volcano with the spew and furnace of some great manufactory--like the orc-plant in the Lord of the Rings--and you would have a scene surely familiar to readers of twenty-first century dystopian fiction.*

*And the image of the erupting volcano should be familiar to some because of its use by one of the more totalitarian and dystopian of the religions of science fiction.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Viking Adventure

Vikings have captured our imaginations in a way that no other people in history have done. Maybe we have ancestral memories of their falling upon us without warning, taking what they wanted and burning the rest. If you had lived during their heyday, Vikings could never have been far from your thoughts. They would always have been there, creeping along the edges of your imagination and your fears, and it would have been equally so for your grandparents before you and your grandchildren after you. There may have been Huns and Goths, Mongols and Turks, Persians and Saracens, stalking along the borderlands of European civilization, but none can compare now in our imaginations to the Vikings.

In thinking about the Viking-fantasy story, it occurs to me now that there are three types. First is the type in which Vikings are the encountered. We see them from the outside, from the perspective of perhaps a more civilized observer. I haven't yet read "A Yank at Valhalla" by Edmond Hamilton (Startling Stories, Jan. 1941), but I suspect that this is an example of the first type. Next is the type in which Vikings are the encounterers. (Blogger doesn't like that word.) In this type, we see things from the perspective of the Vikings themselves, very often in their encounters--historically accurate or not--with American Indians. I have a book, Prince Valiant in the New World by Harold Foster (Nostalgia Press, 1976), that tells such a tale. (Beowulf, in which Grendel and his mother are the encountered, is also of this type, I think.) The third type is the story of the Vikings as a people, their ways of life among themselves and in their own world and culture. If fantasy and science fiction are ultimately stories of encounter, then it's hard, it seems to me, for this third type to fall within those genres, unless the monsters, gods, witches, and undead encountered are a part of Norse mythology and folklore itself and not something from the outside.

My friend Hlafbrot has pointed out that Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard (1891) has a place on the list of Viking literature. I have never read this book, but it's listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, indicating that it's a genre work and not one of conventional or mainstream literature. In fact, if Eric Brighteyes was the first or one of the first modern Viking stories, then maybe it was also the beginning of the Viking-fantasy in our popular culture. Pulp magazines arrived on the scene just five years after Eric Brighteyes was published. I can't say when the first Viking story appeared in a pulp magazine. I also can't say what the first Viking story in Weird Tales might have been. Writers and readers of "The Unique Magazine" seem to have been far more interested in tales of the Orient and the tropics. (1) Robert E. Howard is supposed to have written a lot of Viking stories or quasi-Viking stories. The one that comes to mind, "The Frost Giant's Daughter," never made it into Weird Tales.

After writing about Vikings the other day, I cast about for a book to read and came quickly enough to a novel by one of my favorite authors for children. It's called Viking Adventure, and it's by Clyde Robert Bulla (1914-2007). Like so many Viking stories, this one is about an encounter with American Indians before Columbus. And like so many of the late Mr. Bulla's books, it is told in what I hear as a melancholy voice. Although his books are for children, Clyde Robert Bulla knew what it is to be a child, to suffer pain and loss, loneliness and yearning, to feel small and out of place, to feel like running and hiding, to dream and to have one's dreams thwarted or unfulfilled. If a good book is one that resounds within you even after you have finished reading it, then Viking Adventure is a good book, better, I would hazard, than myriads of supposedly serious and ambitious novels written for adults.

Note

(1) If Viking stories are Northerns, stories of the tropics are Southerns, and those of the Orient are Easterns, then there was far more emphasis on Southerns and Easterns in the pulps than there was on Northerns. Or if people wrote and read stories of the Far North, they were about the North Woods, about the taiga and the tundra, Alaska, the Yukon, and the Arctic, all set in the present of the pulp-fiction era or in the recent past. There was even a pulp magazine called North-West Stories.

Prince Valiant in the New World (1976) is Prince Valiant Book 6, part of a series of storybooks adapted from the comic strip by Hal Foster and published by Nostalgia Press of New York City. Here is the encounter depicted again and again in popular culture: the Viking meets the American Indian in a time before Columbus.

Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard, originally published in 1891, was reprinted again and again during the twentieth century. Here is the cover of the Zebra paperback edition of 1978. The identity of the cover artist is unknown. The furious action (and the depiction of the hero's anatomy) may be under the influence of Frank Frazetta, but the technique is purely 1970s, like that of Michael William Kaluta, Berni Wrightson, or Jeffrey Jones. Update: I hear from bthom1 that the cover artist is Esteban Maroto. Thanks bthom1.

Zebra reprinted Eric Brighteyes in 1982 with different cover art, but the artist is again unknown.

In 1979, Zebra Books issued a sequel, Eric Brighteyes: A Witch's Welcome, penned by Sigfriour Skaldaspillir, better known as Mildred Downey Broxon. The cover artist was Ken Barr, but the mountain in the background wasn't his . . .

For he swiped it from Frank Frazetta's cover for Conan of Cimmeria, in which the quasi-Viking story "The Frost Giant's Daughter" appeared. Though offered to Weird Tales, "The Frost Giant's Daughter" was refused by its editor, Farnsworth Wright, and went instead to the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan. Frazetta's illustration of the story is justly famous.

In 1963, Thomas Y. Crowell Company of New York published Viking Adventure by Clyde Robert Bulla. Here's the cover of the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club version, with illustrations by Douglas Gorsline. Viking Adventure is the story of a boy named Sigurd who goes on an adventure far from home, to Wineland, our America, inhabited only by what we now call Indians. It is a moving story of growth and loss, and I recommend it.

There were Westerns in the pulps, but there were also Northerns, if you want to call them that, but Northerns are not about Vikings. Instead, they're about what Bob and Doug McKenzie call the Great White North. In the pulp magazine North-West Stories (later North-West Romances), these two genres lived side by side. Here is an example of the cover, from the Winter issue of 1950, showing a sort-of Betty Hutton lookalike with her parka conveniently undone and her sweater conveniently tight. This was the 1950s after all, the era of the sweater girl. Anyway, if this were a Weird Tales cover, it would fall into the category of "Woman and Wolf" (click here). The title story in fact is called "The Wolf-Woman of Chandindu," by C. Hall Thompson, who also, as chance would have it, contributed to Weird Tales. More evidence that all things form circles.

Text and captions copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley