Weird Tales: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary-Part Two

August Derleth wrote the first essay to appear in "The Eyrie" in March 1948. Half of it is a catalogue of names and titles. I'll have more on that in a minute. First, Derleth's essay: 

25th Anniversary Issue --
August Derleth

FOR a quarter of a century WEIRD TALES has given those who delight in the fantastic and macabre the best in the genre, and it has remained the most consistently satisfying outlet of its kind. For all these years authors and readers have looked to this unique magazine as something very special, and, despite a welter of imitators, something very special it has remained. A magazine which has brought to the attention of its public the work of such authors as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, Ray Bradbury, and many another fine writer has justified many times over its sterling reason for being and has earned its right to exist. When I began to read WEIRD TALES with the very first issue, I was thirteen, and I had to work at mowing lawns, chopping wood, and the like to earn the quarter that would buy the magazine. Few purchases have ever given me such lasting satisfaction.

It seems incredible that a quarter of a century has passed, and now, when I look back over those rich years of WEIRD TALES, I can experience again the wonderful delight of discovery and the deep reading satisfaction I knew in such stories as Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror, The Music of Erich Zann, The Outsider, and others, [Seabury] Quinn's The Phantom Farmhouse, [H.F.] Arnold's The Night Wire, [Clark Ashton] Smith's A Rendezvous in Averoigne, [Henry S.] Whitehead's Passing of a God, [Arthur J.] Burks' The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee, [Robert E.] Howard's The Black Stone, [C.L.] Moore's Shambleau, [Mary Elizabeth] Counselman's The Three Marked Pennies, [Nictzin] Dyalhis' When the Green Star Waned, [Donald] Wandrei's The Red Brain, [H. Warner] Munn's The Werewolf of Ponkert, [Ray] Bradbury's The Lake, [J. Paul] Suter's Beyond the Door, [Frank] Owen's The Wind That Tramps the World, [Frank Belknap] Long's The Hounds of Tindalos, [Greye] La Spina's Invaders from the Dark, [E. Hoffman] Price's Stranger from Kurdistan, [Carl] Jacobi's Revelations in Black, [A.] Merritt's The Woman of the Wood, [Edmond] Hamilton's Monster-God of Mamurth, [Wilfred Branch] Talman's Two Black Bottles, [Everil] Worrell's The Canal, [John Martin] Leahy's In Amundsen's Tent, [Robert] Bloch's Enoch, and countless other stories space does not permit mentioning.

These first twenty-five years have given us a rich heritage in the strange and wonderful; I have every confidence that the next twenty-five will add increasing stature to WEIRD TALES. 

AUGUST DERLETH.

(Boldface added.)

Alas, Weird Tales had just six and a half years left in its original run. The second twenty-five-year mark would be observed in a second run of just four issues in 1973-1974.

The first name Derleth mentioned in his essay is that of his literary god, H.P. Lovecraft. He couldn't have done anything less. Despite the fact that Quinn and Derleth had more stories in Weird Tales, it is Lovecraft's name that is most closely identified with the magazine. By the way, today, August 20, 2024, would have been Lovecraft's 134th birthday, had he lived as long as some of his characters.

Derleth's second paragraph is mostly just a list. Lists are fine. We all make them. But they're not writing. At best, a list is just filler. At their worst, lists are name-dropping. In his essay "Moving Past Lovecraft," from 2012, author and editor Jeff VanderMeer dropped a lot of names that, truth be told, are not very well known. I guess the rest of us are benighted in comparison because we have different names on our lists, names not to his liking. In the 100th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, from 2023, the current editor of the magazine, Jonathan Maberry, also dropped names in his essay "Cosmic Horror and Weird Tales Go Hand-in-Tentacle." I sense that to be filler. In any case, lists are, again, not writing. Beyond that, we all have access to names and titles and now even to whole stories in Weird Tales. We can all read them and make lists of our own. Ironically, Mr. VanderMeer's call for us to move past Lovecraft appears to have gone unheeded, as the centennial issue of Weird Tales is subtitled "Cosmic Horror Issue." (According to Wikipedia, "cosmic horror" is a term synonymous with "Lovecraftian horror." Jeff VanderMeer even used the term "cosmic horror" in his essay.) Lovecraft's name is mentioned second in Mr. Maberry's essay, second only to that of Robert W. Chambers. Too bad, Mr. VanderMeer. You tried.

I don't know what, if anything, it meant if you were not included in August Derleth's list from 1948. Maybe he liked you just fine, he just wasn't permitted the space to include you. On the other hand, maybe you were like C. Hall Thompson, who may have been on a completely different kind of list created by Derleth, and whose last story for Weird Tales appeared in the May issue of 1948, just two months after the anniversary issue.

To be concluded . . .

August Derleth, from the Green Bay Press-Gazette, March 31, 1963, page 13.

Revised on the morning of publication.
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

A Season of Discovery and Beginning

Tellers of Weird Tales turned ten years old last week. I first wrote on April 22, 2011. My first entry was on C.L. Moore (1911-1987), who grew up in the same neighborhood in Indianapolis in which I grew up, though half a century before. Being from Indiana and having the pride of a Hoosier in me, I took a special interest in her. In the year before beginning this blog, I began writing an article about her. That article was finally published in the summer of 2019 in Traces, the magazine of the Indiana Historical Society. Its working title was "The Weird and Wondrous Fiction of C.L. Moore." It went to print as "Amazing Tales: The Weird and Wondrous Fiction of C.L. Moore." It's because of my research and writing on C.L. Moore, too, that I have a place on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb), but that's for a different article I wrote, published by Paco Arrelano. I'm not a member of the ISFDb, so I'm not sure that I can add to it. I hope someone will add my article from Traces on my behalf. I would also like to hear from Señor Arrelano in hopes that I can get a copy of his magazine Delirio in which my article appeared.

Although C.L. Moore was the subject of my first entry on this blog, she wasn't the reason for my starting it. The impetus actually came while I was reading Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies, edited by Marvin Kaye (1988). Included in that book is the first Damp Man story by Allison V. Harding. Mr. Kaye's introduction to "The Damp Man" is brief, for at the time almost nothing was known about the pseudonymous Harding. But here in front of me was a mystery, one I was determined to solve. I began on April 26, 2011, ten years ago today. I solved the mystery less than a month later, on May 24, 2011, with my entry entitled "Who Was Allison V. Harding?"

The answer to that question was and is Jean Milligan (1919-2004), later the wife of the former associate editor and art editor of Weird Tales magazine, Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015). And now I see that I have to update my entry on the late Mr. Buchanan. Anyway, I have to admit that I was a little hard on Marvin Kaye for the part he played in the Weird Tales debacle of a few years back, but I also have to thank him for the part he unknowingly played in getting this blog off the ground. I have to reassert, too, that I am the person who discovered the identity of Allison V. Harding and Jean Milligan. No one else did that, and no one else should be taking credit for the discovery or pretending like it's something that just fell out of the sky. (This is where the passive voice, mostly a scourge, comes in handy. In using it, you don't have to say that somebody did something, only that something happened, no doer necessary.) Anyway, I did it. I discovered the identity of Allison V. Harding. It's my work. I expect to be cited for it. And I have this to say to people who like to glom on to the work of others: if you want to be known for your work, then do your work. Get up and do it and don't thieve it from others. And once you have done it, publish it, however you can. Get it out there into the world.

* * *

There has been some controversy recently about Allison V. Harding and Jean Milligan. I might have been a little responsible for that, too, by suggesting that Lamont Buchanan was actually the writer behind the pseudonym. The controversy comes from the idea that we're all trying to take something away from women writers, that somehow we're anti-woman and that we want to erase them and silence them. That isn't my idea at all. In fact, it's closer to the opposite. (Should I point out here that the first three authors and five out of the first ten about whom I wrote on this blog were women?)

My idea that Lamont Buchanan was Allison V. Harding came to me as I was reading the last Damp Man story, "The Damp Man Again," from Weird Tales, May 1949. As I was reading, it occurred to me that this was not the work of a woman, for no woman would write about another woman in this way. Only a man--a bitter and angry man at that--could write about women with this kind of cruelty, mean-spiritedness, and misogyny, writing that has in it even intimations of psychopathy and a desire to hurt and punish women. Feminists might object to my suggestion or belief that Lamont Buchanan was Allison V. Harding, but they should first read "The Damp Man Again"--"Take the Z-Train," too--and see what they think afterwards. It's worth noting here that Lamont Buchanan was still a single man in 1949 when "The Damp Man Again" was published. He and Jean Milligan were not married until 1952, in The Bronx, where they went on to live out their lives together. By the way, there is a Harding Avenue in The Bronx. If we play a word game, then Harding Avenue can become Harding Ave. can become Harding, A.V., can become A.V. Harding . . . you get where I'm going.

* * *

There has been another recent controversy when it comes to Allison V. Harding. I wasn't the first person to have made a connection between Lamont Buchanan and J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) and Salinger's character Holden Caulfield, but I think I was the first to get it out into the world of science fiction and fantasy fandom and scholarship. I don't really believe that J.D. Salinger was Allison V. Harding, and I doubt that Buchanan and Salinger, who may have been friends in their college years, collaborated or talked to each other about writing as late as 1947 or 1949 or 1950. But you never know. There seems to be a hole in the scholarship on J.D. Salinger that hasn't been filled yet. I still want to say to all of the bored academics of this world, "Get up and get busy and forget about all of that woke BS that seemingly occupies everybody in your formerly respectable fields!" That's a little long and not very pithy for an exhortation, but you get the idea. In the meantime, the only people who seem to be interested in the idea that Buchanan was the model for Caulfield are those vying for or writing about Buchanan's estate. Money has its ways.

* * *

I have never counted the number of authors who contributed to Weird Tales. Years ago I estimated it at about 700. I had thought that by now I would be about finished with them. But in writing this blog I have gotten on to things other than biography. Biography and the discovery of lives and identities is fun, but so are other things. In any case, I'm planning to get back to some biographies soon. First I have to finish my current series, which is going on about as long as Burroughs' Mars series. I didn't want this anniversary to go by unobserved, though, and so I will let you know that Tellers of Weird Tales is ten years old in this season of discovery and beginning. I plan to continue writing, even after I go over the 1,000,000-visits mark sometime this summer, even after I have covered all of the magazine's writers and artists.

Ten years is a long time. As one of my entomology professors would say, "Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana."

C.L. Moore at her desk at the bank in Indianapolis, another discovery I have made, and maybe the only photograph of her at work. I presume that the typewriter in front of her is a Royal typewriter and the one that she used in composing her stories. The name of her Venerian character Yarol is an anagram of that brandname. From the Indianapolis Times, May 22, 1939.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A Birthday Wish

As you know, my dad died in August. Today would have been his eighty-third birthday. He liked to say that he was FBI--Full-Blooded Irish. His Hanley grandparents came to America from western Ireland in the late 1800s. His great-grandfather served in the British army under the Duke of Wellington and fought at the Battle of Waterloo. I would wager that my dad and his lone surviving brother were the only living Americans in the year 2020 to have had a great-grandfather serve in that long-ago clash of arms. It's a pretty amazing thing when you think about it.

The Duke of Wellington was an Anglo-Irishman and advocated for Catholic Emancipation for his native island. My dad's family were and are staunch Catholics. Many were also staunchly anti-British. It is an irony that their progenitor served in the British army, but then they never knew anything about him or his service, for Peter Hanley is only a recent discovery for us.

My dad always liked to read about and watch movies and TV shows about Nazis and the Mafia. I asked him a long time ago why this was so. He said that he was fascinated by how people gain and exercise power. To one descended from a race of utterly powerless and often despairing Irishmen, the idea that a person might hold great power must have been perplexing, if not inconceivable, to him. To be poor and Irish and Catholic in both Ireland and America was to be on the bottom rung of the ladder. Charles Durning's character in Blazing Saddles said it all. Anyway, for the first time in my life, I realize that my dad was born almost exactly nine months after St. Patrick's Day: the power of the Irish people is in their great numbers and fecundity.

Also in their talk. My dad's mother's maiden name, Daly, refers to "one who is present at assemblies," or, simply, "gregarious," as I have seen it translated. It comes from the same root that has given the lower house of the Irish legislature--the Dáil Éireann--its name. The Dalys have also included many bards and poets going back to the Middle Ages. A Daly of Ireland had delivered to my dad's funeral the most breathtakingly beautiful and angelic arrangement of flowers I have ever seen--warm, creamy-white lilies and other flowers, extraordinary in every way. Thank you to our very, very distant cousin.

Of course the other side of the Irish gift for language is its equal gift for lies, exaggerations, boasting, misrepresentations, wordplay, and other verbal mischief. Remember that blarney and malarkey are Irish words. My dad had that talent in spades.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

P.S. Here is the URL and link to all of the Hanleys in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=hanley&type=Name

And here are the Dalys:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=daly&type=Name

Have fun reading!

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Three and a Half

A month ago I wrote part three of this series on The Mysterious Dolgov. Then the world came to an end. Since then, my copy of Frederik Pohl's memoir The Way the Future Was has been sitting on the floor, waiting like a child to be picked up again. Like I said before, I have only a paperback edition of this book and there isn't any index in it. Today, after finishing a job, I picked it up again and looked through it a little more closely than before.

And I still didn't find Boris Dolgov's name.

However, there are some clues scattered like breadcrumbs through the text. They may not lead to The Mysterious Dolgov, but they lead to a supposition. Here are the breadcrumbs, from the Ballantine Books edition of May 1979:

First, Pohl listed the names of the original Futurians, a science fiction fan club formed in 1937 in New York City. "As near as I can remember," he wrote, "[they] were:

• Isaac Asimov
• Daniel Burford
• Chester Cohen
• Jack Gillespie
• Cyril Kornbluth
• Walter Kubilius
• David A. Kyle
• Herman Leventman
• Robert W. Lowndes
• John B. Michel
• Frederik Pohl
• Jack Rubinson
• Richard Wilson
• Donald A. Wollheim
• Dirk Wylie

"Later additions," Pohl continued, "included Hannes Bok, Damon Knight, and Judith Merril [. . .]." (p. 67) (For the writers and artists who later contributed to Weird Tales, hover over their names and then click on the links.)

Second, on May 11, 1937, Frederik Pohl met a woman he described as "strikingly beautiful, and strikingly intelligent, too, in a sulky, humorous, deprecatory way [. . . ]." (p. 74) Her real name was Doris Marie Claire Baumgardt, but her friends--and her future husband, Frederik Pohl--called her Doë. Doë was a writer and artist. In 1940 and 1941, again in the 1950s, all under the name Leslie Perri, she wrote fiction and non-fiction and drew pictures for science fiction publications. Here are her professional credits, in their entirety, from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb):

• Cover and interior illustrations for The Final Men by H.G. Wells, a seven-page chapbook published by Robert W. Lowndes in March 1940
• "Fantasy Reviews: Fantasy Films," review published in Astonishing Stories (June 1940), with Forrest J. Ackerman, and under editor Frederik Pohl (1)
• "Fantasy Reviews: Fantasy Music," review published in Super Science Stories (July 1940), under editor Frederik Pohl
• "Space Episode," short story published in Future (Dec. 1941), under an uncredited editor and behind a cover illustration by Hannes Bok
• "In the Forest," short story published in If (Sept. 1953), under editor James L. Quinn
• "Under the Skin," short story published in Infinity Science Fiction (June 1956), under editor Larry T. Shaw (also appeared as "The Untouchables") (2)

So here we see some of the same names again: Pohl, Lowndes, Bok.

Third, Pohl became editor of two new magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, in the fall of 1939. (Both made their debut in 1940.) He had a budget of about a penny per word for fiction. "Art was something else," he remembered, continuing:

When I brought my budget to Aleck Portegal, the art director, he looked at me with compassion and disgust. Where the hell was I going to get artists to work for that kind of money? Writers, sure. Everybody knew what writers were like. But artists did a job of work for a dollar, and they wouldn't take less. That didn't worry me because I had a secret weapon. In fact, two of them. There were the fan artists, as eager as the fan writers for publication in a science-fiction magazine. And besides, my girlfriend, Doë, was an art student at Cooper Union. She had at her fingertips a whole school of striving newcomers to whom five dollars would look like a hell of a price for something they would gladly have bribed us to print. (p. 102)

Unfortunately, the art students proved "a disappointment," Pohl wrote, "and most of the fans were worse. But there were a couple who were competent, and one--Hannes Bok, whom Ray Bradbury had been touting at the World Convention not long before--who was superb." (p. 102) A few pages later, still recounting his travails as an editor strapped by a tight budget, Pohl wrote: "Hannes Bok, Doë, Dave Kyle, and others did illustrations for me, and I farmed out departments and columns to those who wanted to do them [. . .]." (pp. 110-111)

And that's it. No matter how hard I try, I can't get Frederik Pohl to say Boris Dolgov's name.

So, did Dolgov contribute to magazines edited by Pohl? Not according to ISFDb. But then I don't think we should rule out that Dolgov worked anonymously or under a different name. In any case, we know that Dolgov contributed to magazines edited by two other Futurians, Robert W. Lowndes and Donald A. Wollheim, and that these five drawings came in 1941. Three were collaborations with Hannes Bok. (3)

So again, I'm working on the idea that Boris Dolgov was born in about 1910, probably in New York City, and that he was peripherally attached to science fiction fandom in that city during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Like I said, Bok came out of fandom, too, and I wonder if that's where they met and where they decided to collaborate. But what if instead Dolgov was an art student at Cooper Union in about 1939-1940, and what if he was recruited into the science fiction field by Doë Baumgardt? Maybe a look at the student rolls from Cooper Union, if they still exist, would tell us something . . .

By the way, Doë Marie Claire Baumgardt Pohl Owens Wilson, aka Leslie Perri, was born one hundred years ago this week, on April 27, 1920. Happy Birthday, Doë!

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Pohl and Doë were married on August 31, 1940 (in a Presbyterian church of all places). See The Way the Future Was, pages 112 and following, for more on their short-lived marriage.

(2) Doë also contributed to fanzines during the 1930s and '40s.

(3) Dolgov's first illustration for Weird Tales was in the issue of September 1941. His last appeared in July 1954. In other words, after working very briefly for a couple of science fiction magazines in 1941, Dolgov found regular work with Weird Tales and stayed with it until the very end.

The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl (1978), with cover art by Joseph Lombardero (1922-2004). Ignore the -dero part: as far as anyone knows, Lombardero was not an evil, cavern-dwelling creature sprung from the imagination of Richard Sharpe Shaver.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

From Things To Come into The Space Trilogy-A Final Aside

I'm still catching up on last year, on my reading and writing. After reading 1985 by Anthony Burgess late in the year, I read another dystopian novel, Anthem by Ayn Rand. This was the first time I had read either of these authors. As it turns out, my reading of Anthem was timely in two ways. More on that in a while.

First published in Great Britain in 1938, Anthem was Ayn Rand's second novel. It is not only dystopian but also post-apocalyptic: in its pages, a new dark age has descended upon the world after disaster has also descended. The book is brief. I have the Signet edition of 1961 in which the text of the story is only 112 pages long. It starts off well. In fact, it's fascinating. Like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, from 1924 (in the English-language edition), Anthem takes the form of a diary of a young man caught in an oppressive, totalitarian, and thoroughly collectivized society. Also as in We, the characters lack names. Ayn Rand cleverly gives them codewords associated in her time and ours with the progressive/leftist/socialist/statist cause, followed by a numerical designation. The narrator then, is Equality 7-2521, but there also these alphanumerics: Union 5-3992, International 4-8818, Liberty 5-3000, Fraternity 2-5503, Solidarity 9-6347, Collective 0-0009, Democracy 4-6998, Unanimity 7-3304, Harmony 9-2642--you get the picture. It's kind of like a commie phonebook from the 1950s ("Beechwood 4-5789 . . ."). Significantly, Liberty--the only word among these untainted by the real-world collectivism of the twentieth century--is the name of Equality 7-2521's girlfriend, the woman who will inspire him to rebel against his condition.

Anthem goes downhill pretty quickly about midway through when the reader starts to realize that this is not so much a work of fiction as a vehicle for its author's wacky ideas. (There's even a postcard in my paperback edition that you can use to send away for more Objectivist wackiness. The whole business reminds me of Scientology.) Before you reach that point, though, you encounter some genuine power in the plight of the protagonist, in his struggles to assert his individuality, and in his yearning to love the young woman named Liberty . . . who kind of fades away once they have gained their freedom. Maybe it wasn't love after all that he wanted.

Before that, the collectivism in Anthem has reached a point where there aren't any singular personal pronouns. A person calls himself "We" (shades of Zamyatin's earlier novel) and the other person "They":

"Speak these words again," they whispered.

"Which words?" we asked. But they did not answer, and we knew it.

"Our dearest one," we whispered. (p. 60)

Only when they are free and living in a house from olden times do they encounter for the first time the word "I." But then it becomes "I", "I", "I," never "you," or better yet, "Thou." Like I said, the girlfriend fades away.

I found out not long after reading Anthem that Merriam Webster dictionary decided that "they" would be their word of the year for 2019. The context and meaning are different, but the purpose, it seems to me, is more or less the same: as in 1984, it is to change the meaning of words and language so that our perceptions of reality might be altered and so that we might be deprived of our ability to think independently and to dissent from prevailing thought: to call a man "he" and a woman "she" will soon be a thoughtcrime, if it isn't already.

That's the first timely thing about my reading of Anthem. The other is that Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for the rock group Rush, died on January 7, 2020, at age sixty-seven.  (He was born on the day the Flatwoods Monster came to earth, September 12, 1952.) As it turns out, the late Mr. Peart was influenced by Ayn Rand, specifically by Anthem. Strange world.

* * *

Ayn Rand may or may not have read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, but George Orwell read it. We know that because he wrote a review of it published seventy-four years ago this month, in January 1946. (It seems pretty likely to me that she read it, too, inasmuch as her own Dystopia resembles Zamyatin's, plus he was her countryman: she would surely have heard of him and his book. She would also have had the advantage of reading it in the language in which it was written, for whatever that's worth.) Orwell read C.S. Lewis, too. You can read his review of That Hideous Strength ("The Scientists Take Over") by clicking here. The British scientist J.B.S. Haldane also read and at least twice criticized Lewis' Space Trilogy. You can read his articles ("Auld Hornie, F.R.S." and "More Anti-Lewisite") by clicking here.

In case you're keeping score at home, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a former atheist who became a devout believer and a Christian apologist; George Orwell (1903-1950) was a socialist, thus presumably also an atheist but also strangely enough a kind of conservative; J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) was an atheist and thoroughgoing Marxist (I guess he and Orwell would have been on opposite sides of the same side during the Spanish Civil War); Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was an atheist, a rabid individualist, an advocate of capitalism, and a kooky cultist; and Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was an Old Bolshevik but also the first writer to have his work censored once the new Bolsheviks--you know, the killing kind--came into power in Russia in the early 1920s.

One more thing. (There's always one more thing in this Columbo universe.) George Orwell encountered We for the first time because of the poet and literary historian Gleb Struve (1898-1985) of the original Magdeburg Struves. (Gleb's father was Peter Struve, first a Marxist, then an anti-Marxist.) Well, Gleb's second cousin (I think, if I have my Struves lined up right) was Otto Struve (1897-1963), an astronomer who initiated Project Ozma, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence carried out at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia (the same state in which the Flatwoods Monster came to Earth, this on a the same day, as you will remember from earlier in this article, that Neil Peart was born), in 1960. That led to many things, directly or roundabout-ly, including a good deal of science fiction such as "The Listeners" by James Gunn (1968), the movie The Day of the Dolphin (1973), and Contact by Carl Sagan (1985).

There are not only six degrees of Kevin Bacon, there are six degrees of everything.

One more thing: These asides are getting to be longer than the original series.

One more thing and then I promise you I will go: Today, January 20, 2020, is the 136th anniversary of Yevgeny Zamyatin's birth under the old calendar, so Happy Birthday to Him!

Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1953. Cover story: "Anthem" by Ayn Rand. Cover art by Lawrence showing a hunky 1950s guy with a death grip on Reddy Kilowatt, and his hot girlfriend, whom he unfairly ignores here and in the conclusion of the novel, relegated to the background.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Problems in Science Fiction No. 2-Continued

On July 8, I wrote about problems in science fiction. I had thought that I was done with that topic, but am I ever done with any topic? Maybe not. Anyway, I had an exchange of email messages with my friend Hlafbrot who is a fan and student of science fiction, and that exchange helped me clarify some of my thoughts. I would like to say thank you to Hlafbrot for putting so much time and thought into his messages to me and for inspiring further thought on this topic of problems in science fiction.

* * *

As I have thought more on it, I see that a distinction can be made between two types of projection, speculation, or extrapolation in science fiction:

First are things that don't change. These are easy to project into the future because what is true today will also be true tomorrow. I'm thinking specifically here of human nature. If you write convincingly about human nature, your story can never be obsolete. Witness the Iliad and the Odyssey, composed nearly three millennia ago and still comprehendible to us today because its people are real. Now, some people believe that human nature is changeable, malleable, or perfectible. This belief in the perfectibility of human beings is what makes the utopian scheme or story seem possible. I think that belief is unfounded, though, as I don't believe that human nature changes, and because of that I see Utopia as an impossibility. It might make for a good story, but it's purely a fantasy, and I think that the characters in a utopian story are unlikely to be recognizable as human beings because of their fully perfected state. (1) Anyway, if you're writing about the people of the future, you can be certain that they will be like us: at the same time angel and devil, noble and base, civilized and savage, loving and murderous, and on and on, just like everybody else throughout history. If you recognize that human beings have an unchanging nature, and you're good with characterization and dialogue, you might write a good story set in the future, regardless of the scientific and technological background of your story. (2)

Second are things that change: science, medicine, technology, culture, government--basically any and every human institution. (The basic principle here might be that anything created by God or Nature is eternal and unchanging, while anything created by human beings exists within Time and is subject to change.) If you try to create a plausible future and you stray towards prediction, I think you're likely to be overwhelmed by the possibility of change. This is what I meant when I wrote that no one can keep up with the many rapid changes going on today or the things that will change even more rapidly in the future. If you try to make predictions, you'll go off course: your story will lose its focus because you're trying to meet the requirements of plausibility instead of the requirements of storytelling. I have been working on a long science fiction story and have completed a first printed draft of it. My story, called "The Shoals of Carillon," is set far in the future when, in actuality, the issues treated in it are issues of today or of the very near future. So I wonder, is my story already obsolete or will it soon be obsolete? Is my story implausible because its projections are likely to prove inaccurate? I hope not. I hope that it's good enough as a story that the reader can ignore its (admittedly) skewed future-chronology.

* * *

In my story, I have reduced the problems treated to just a couple, and I have linked them. As I have already written in this space, I have tried to isolate a certain problem and treat only that problem. I have ignored associated problems, as well as unrelated problems that might logically be a part of this or any future society. One of the problems that I treat is the ever-present danger of the overarching and controlling State. The other is the use by the State of technology to expand and perfect its control over the populace in its grasp. This is, I think, a somewhat conservative idea, but I don't want to hit anybody over the head with it as such. I have tried to keep it subtle and real--a perfect horror not only for the freedom-loving conservative but also for the freedom-loving anybody and everybody. I think the reader will see this problem in the world of today not so much in the threat represented by the State (very often the villain of the conservative-minded person) as in the threat represented by the Corporation (the more likely villain in the eyes of the more liberal- or progressive-minded person). I'm thinking here of the threats--real or imagined--represented by Google (which created and maintains the platform for this blog), Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Apple, and so on. (3) In my story, I have combined the State and the Corporation as an institution called a Unity, which is in control of a fully networked world-society in which there is no separation between the State, the government, the economy, the corporation, the society, and the people as a whole and as individuals. The technological, cultural, and societal mechanisms of tyranny might change in the future, as human inventions and institutions do, but the tyrannical impulse is, I think, a permanent part of human nature, and so I believe it to be unchanging: it will be the same five hundred years from now as it is today. I have built my story around that unchanging impulse and two eternal and unchanging aspects of human nature that will forever be arrayed against it, namely love and the human desire to be free. Ultimately, my story is a love story, and I hope that that fact, if none other, will save it from obsolescence and implausibility.

Notes

(1) As I have said before, how does anyone propose to make a perfect society out of imperfect parts? And on those perfect parts, the perfected people of Utopia: Are they not just robots or inhuman monsters? Aren't they really just things that exist beyond and forever separated from us by the uncanny valley?

(2) Some science fiction writers aren't very good at these things. I think, for example, of Isaac Asimov, who seems to have been lacking in the department of characterization. In contrast, Robert A. Heinlein, despite whatever else might have been true of him as a human being, was pretty well guaranteed to write snappy dialogue and to create recognizably human characters.

(3) I recently saw a really terrifying video produced by Google about its plans for what the rest of us could only call Dystopia. And I mean really terrifying. It's called "The Selfish Ledger," and you can watch it on a website called The Verge, accompanied there by an article called "Google's Selfish Ledger Is an Unsettling Vision of Silicon Valley Social Engineering," written by Vlad Savov and dated May 17, 2018, here.

And by the way, Happy Birthday to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who would have been one hundred twenty-nine years old today, had he lived longer than anybody ever (except for maybe some of his characters).

Copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fires Before Easter

For the second time in less than a year, a great work of culture, art, and history has burned. First it was the the National Museum of Brazil in September of last year. This time, of course, it was the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Things look better today than they did last night, but it's hard to see the fire at Notre-Dame as anything less than a disaster.

I wish to speak, and I might use any tenuous connection there might be between the cathedral and Weird Tales or weird fiction as a pretext, but the things I wish to say have little to do with the magazine or the genre. As it stands now, the fire is supposed to have been caused by an accident. Risking their lives, Parisian firefighters finally extinguished it several hours after it began. Other Parisians rescued relics and works of art from the interior as the fire raged, including the Crown of Thorns, saved by a heroic Catholic priest. (The Crown of Thorns, the flames, and the Cross--which at Notre-Dame survived--are among the elements of the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.) We can't take anything from these and the many millions of people of Paris and of France, and we can't exploit the incalculable loss experienced by them in this tragedy. But we also can't overlook the symbolism of the event, or a possible interpretation of it as something more than a mere fire in a centuries-old building. We are now in Holy Week and we will soon have the holiest day in the Christian calendar. It seems needless to point out that Western civilization in general and Europe in particular were built upon a Judeo-Christian foundation. The cathedral of Notre-Dame was constructed at the height of an age of faith, but in a later age of reason, after having been seized by the State, it was abused, plundered, and converted to the house of an atheistic cult. Soon returned to the Roman Catholic Church, the cathedral was again taken over by the State in 1905, and it is under the ownership of the State that Notre-Dame burned. For eight and a half centuries Notre-Dame stood, and now it burns.

I don't think it's any stretch to say that the current European State--and Western culture in general, at least among the élite--is secular, materialist, and anti-Christian, even radically and viciously anti-Christian. I don't think anyone in the French State has anything to gain and much to lose in the burning of a cathedral. Notre-Dame and places like it have become secular symbols of the cities or countries in which they are located. Even adherents to anti-Christian and post-Christian religions have their uses for things made by the Church and its members. The Hagia Sophia comes to mind as an example. It's curious to me, though, that the current president of France should ask for help from other nations to rebuild Notre-Dame. I guess his France is fiercely independent except when it's not. More to the point, people of faith built the cathedral to begin with. Are there not enough now in France to rebuild it? I'm certain there are in fact. Despite the best efforts of the State in that nation and elsewhere, Christianity lives and thrives, as do faith, hope, love, and charity in the hearts of Christians everywhere. And who has stepped forward to offer funds for the rebuilding? None other than the wealthy of France, the same kind of people who are ceaselessly vilified by the leftist and socialist State and its true believers, the same who are looked at as an endless source for legalized plunder. As always, though, that same State and its adherents survive on other people's money, and as always they bite the hand that feeds them. In any case, I believe that Notre-Dame will be rebuilt. I also believe that some people will see this as a symbolic event--"a wakeup call" as people say after there has been a terrorist attack. Some will even see it as an intervention or as a kind of miracle, as an act of God, not in the mundane, actuarial sense, but in the real, literal sense. In 1944, Adolf Hitler demanded to know: Is Paris burning? The German commander there stayed his hand and did not set the city afire. Yesterday a symbol of the city, of France, of Christendom itself burned. Are we paying attention? And if so, how will we respond, not just to the fire in the cathedral but to the flames that threaten to burn down Western civilization? With post-Christian lassitude and ennui? Or with vigor and confidence charged by belief? In the choice between fire and ice, we seem to have chosen ice. We are in trouble, perhaps without even realizing how seriously we are in trouble. Is this then a fire that might thaw us, that might warm us, warn us, and wake us?

* * *

From the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, selected titles containing the phrase "Notre Dame":

• "The Fools' Pope," an excerpt from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo (1831) in The Monster Book of Monsters, Michael O'Shaughnessy, ed. (1988)
• "Notre Dame des Eaux" by Ralph Adams Cram in Black Spirits and White: A Book of Ghost Stories (1895)   
• "The Juggler of Notre Dame" by Anatole France in Tales from a Mother-of-Pearl Casket (1896) 
• "The Specter of Notre Dame" by Lloyd Owen in Ghost Stories (May 1931)

I have written before about Weird Tales from France, but neither Victor Hugo (1802-1885) nor Anatole France (1844-1924) had bylines in "The Unique Magazine," even if Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame is recognizably a Gothic work (and his title character was an Aurora monster model of the 1960s). Today is Anatole France's birthday by the way, so Happy Birthday, Anatole!

Notre-Dame converted into an airbus station, from Le Vingtième Siècle (1883) by the French artist and writer Albert Robida (1848-1926), reproduced in Science Fiction: An Illustrated History by Sam J. Lundwall (1977). As I have written before, the artist is a canary in the coal mine of culture and history. In this case, the artist foresaw that a cathedral might one day be used for worldly purposes. At least these people are having fun: perhaps Robida and visionaries like him could not have equally foreseen the funlessness of our world today. (We may be hedonistic but there doesn't seem to be much fun and certainly no love or warmth in any of it. In America at least, that funlessness seems to come from a certain Protestant, more specifically Puritan, worldview that--even if they have thrown off Christianity as the most hateful of things--infects progressives like a disease. The creation of Utopia-on-Earth is, after all, a deadly serious business, partly because it must be done NOW, for there is no after.) Anyway, all of this makes me think of the opening sequence in La Dolce Vita (1960) in which a statue of Christ, dangling from a helicopter, shows religion in our age to be merely a worldly spectacle to distract and momentarily entertain bored and jaded people.

The box lid for the 1960s Aurora monster model of Quasimodo, from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1923), the screenplay for which was cowritten by Perley Poore Sheehan (1875-1943), who was, as it turns out, a teller of weird tales.

Text and captions copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Paul Ernst (1899-1985)-Part One

Aka Chris Brand, Frederick Carr, George Alden Edson, George Edson, Ernest Jason Fredericks, Emerson Graves, Kenneth Robeson, Paul Frederick Stern
Author
Born November 7, 1899, Akron, Ohio
Died September 21, 1985, Pinellas County (possibly in Largo), Florida

When I first looked at Paul Ernst a few years ago, information on his life was pretty well missing. That has changed, but Wikipedia still has his birth and death dates wrong. His biography on that website is otherwise spare. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is better, but it has a link to the biography of another man (German actor Paul Ernst [1866-1933]) on the Internet Movie Database. It also has a link to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which has Ernst's place of birth wrong. (His place of death on that same website may or may not be right.) I guess the thing to do is to start with primary sources.

First, according to Summit County, Ohio, birth records, Paul Frederick Ernst was born on November 7, 1899, in Akron, Ohio, to Louis C. and Nellie A. (Ticknor) Ernst. They had married on August 22, 1897, in Portage County, Ohio, and Paul was their firstborn and only child. Louis Ernst worked as a railroad postal clerk. His parents were immigrants from Germany.

By 1910, Louis Ernst was gone. His widow Nellie, then working as a dressmaker in her own home, was in Chicago with ten-year-old Paul. She remarried on October 14, 1915, in Cook County, Illinois. Her new husband was George B. Kerr. He was nearly thirty years her senior. Paul Ernst served in the U.S. Navy from June 7, 1918, to March 19, 1919. In the U.S. census of 1920, he, his mother, and his stepfather were living in Chicago, where Kerr managed a brass foundry. Paul Ernst, giving his age as twenty-two, was unemployed at the time. (Ernst may actually have been counted twice in that census, both times in Chicago.)

The next record I have for Paul Ernst is for a trip he made with his mother to Europe and back. On December 19, 1928, the two arrived in New York City from Naples. They gave their address as 540 Brampton Place in Chicago. That place seems to be no longer in existence.

I have not found Ernst in the 1930 census, but in 1940, he was living in Buckingham Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and working as a freelance writer. He was also married. His wife was named Martha, and the two let the enumerator of the census know that they had lived in the same place in 1935. She was the former Martha Jones, who had lived in Chicago with her parents. In 1930, she was single. That narrows down the marriage date for Paul Ernst and Martha Jones to the period 1930-1935. Ernst was in New Hope in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1942 when he filled out his draft card. At five feet, ten inches tall, he was a slight 140 pounds.

That's where the public records leave off until the death of Martha (Jones) Ernst on May 5, 1974, in Pinellas County, Florida. She was seventy-five years old at her death. (She was born on December 26, 1898.) Paul Ernst remarried after his wife's death. His second wife, Rae Ernst of Largo, Florida, died on May 1, 1989, at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Florida, at the age of ninety. (May was a bad month for the wives of Paul Ernst.) "A native of Finland," reads her obituary, "she moved to the [Tampa] area in 1953. She was a retired executive for AT&T. She was past president of Telephone Pioneer[s] of America." (1, 1a)

In between those two deaths, Paul Ernst himself died. That unhappy event took place on September 21, 1985, when he was eighty-five years old. At the time of his death, Ernst lived at 202 Crestwood Lane, Largo, Florida. According to his obituary, he had arrived in the area twenty years before from Pennsylvania. "He was a U.S. Navy veteran," it read. "He was a member of the Pelican Golf Club, Belleair." (2)

I guess it's no wonder that the facts in the life of Paul Ernst are so hard to come by. His parents died before he reached mid life. He didn't have any brothers or sisters. He also didn't have any children as far as I can tell. His first wife died before him. And, finally, his second wife, whom he had married late in life, had been married before and had only a daughter, in other words another family apart from him. In any case, Wikipedia is wrong, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database is right but has an errant link, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has his dates right but at least one of the places wrong. Here's hoping that corrections are on the way. Oh, and by the way, today would have been his 119th birthday, so Happy Birthday, Paul Ernst!

Next: The Writing Career of Paul Ernst

Notes

(1) Tampa Tribune, May 3, 1989, p. 110.

(1a) Rae R. Ernst was also known as Rae M. Keller and Rae R. Lindquist.

(2) Tampa Tribune, September 24, 1985, p. 20. According to public records, Ernst died in Pinellas County. I assume he died either at home or at a local hospital.

Updated on February 2, 2022.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Two Hundred Years of Frankenstein

I had hoped to begin writing today a new series on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her Gothic romance and proto-science fiction novel Frankenstein. The occasion is the two-hundredth anniversary of her beginning the composition of Frankenstein, supposed now to have taken place on June 16, 1816, by Lake Geneva. Here in the Midwest, we have had a cool, rainy, and stormy spring season. Mary Godwin and her companions--her future husband Percy Shelley, his friend Lord Byron, Byron's physician Dr. John Polidari, and Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont--experienced something like that as midsummer approached in 1816. Rather than go out on excursions, they stayed in and read. They also decided on a contest to write a ghost story. Frankenstein was the most famous--and enduring--result. Unfortunately, I'm caught up in other things, so the series I had planned will have to wait. In the meantime, we can all wish the creature a happy birthday.

Copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Happy Birthday, General Relativity!

The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe.

--from Modern Times by Paul Johnson (Harper, 1983)

One hundred years ago today, on November 25, 1915, Albert Einstein presented a paper to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, a paper that set forth a theory that radically remade the world. The theory was General Relativity, and it was confirmed, as Paul Johnson wrote, four years after its presentation, when the light of a distant star was shown to have bent around the sun. People would go on talking about the interstellar ether and other outmoded concepts for years afterwards, but to those who were paying attention to such things, relativity presented new possibilities.

Paul Johnson's thesis is that relativity passed from science into other fields of thought:

At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism. (p. 4)

Coupled to Freudianism, Darwinism, Marxism, and other nineteenth-century isms, relativism helped make the horrors of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century possible. None of that can be laid at Einstein's feet, of course, but the confusion of relativism with relativity is an example of how "[t]he scientific genius impinges on humanity, for good or ill, far more than any statesman or warlord." (p. 5) I might add that the words "scientific moron" or "pseudoscientific genius" might easily be substituted for "scientific genius" in Paul Johnson's formulation.

Relativity opened doors of imagination for writers and artists as well as for scientists and dictators. In January 1919, before the British expedition to the southern hemisphere to take pictures of the solar eclipse, the first magazine devoted to fantasy fiction, Der Orchideengarten, went to press in Einstein's home country of Germany. The Thrill Book, an American magazine, followed in March of that year. Four years later, in March 1923, Weird Tales began. That magazine, "The Unique Magazine," was the first American magazine of its kind. By the time it went into publication, writers, just like the general public, were at least aware of Einstein and his theories, even if they didn't quite understand them. H.P. Lovecraft, an amateur astronomer and a man of great learning, famously mentioned Einstein in his work. So did his followers. "The Whisperer in Darkness" by Lovecraft (Weird Tales, Aug. 1931) and "The Hounds of Tindalos" by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. (Weird Tales, Mar. 1929) are among the stories touching upon Einstein and relativity. Both stories invoke the possibilities of time travel by relativistic physics.

I don't know who was first among Weird Tales writers to mention Einstein and relativity, but future editor Farnsworth Wright is a candidate, for in October 1923, Weird Tales published his story "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension." It's a humorous story and not one likely to appeal to Lovecraft fans. I won't spoil the ending any more than it's already spoiled. "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" was reprinted in The Moon Terror (1927) and The Best of Weird Tales: 1923 (1997).

Since it was first propounded, relativity has made more than horrors possible. It has also helped us make things of elegance and beauty, including works of art. Without it, science fiction would still live in the age of the ether, which was fine in its time, but limited. Now the only limit is c, and even that is no great obstacle to the science fiction imagination. So Happy Birthday to General Relativity!

Further Reading
"H.P. Lovecraft and Albert Einstein," a four-part article on the blog Lovecraftian Science: Scientific Investigations into the Cthulhu Mythos, beginning February 23, 2014, here.

Intellectuals--scientists, writers, college professor types--like to believe that their ideas are important and influential. Too often, they try to make their ideas important by forcing them on to others. Few things enrage them more than being ignored. Einstein was different: people paid attention. But maybe not as much as what he and others thought. Leave it to the cartoonist to puncture intellectual self-importance. That's what Rea Irvin did with this drawing for The New Yorker, reprinted in The Second New Yorker Album (1929).

The first Weird Tales anthology was The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch and Stories by Anthony M. Rud, Vincent Starrett and Farnsworth Wright, published in 1927 by Popular Fiction Publishing of Indianapolis. Among the four stories in the book is "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" by Wright, future editor of "The Unique Magazine." The cover artist is unknown. It could very well have been William F. Heitman. 

Wright's story was reprinted seventy years later in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923 (1997). This is the only volume in what looked like it was going to be a series. Someone ought to continue it, but that doesn't seem likely to happen. The cover artist is Stephen Fabian.

Original text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley