April Aliens & April Invasions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Andrew Brosnatch's Cover.

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

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

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Last Picture Shown

Many years ago, author Jeff VanderMeer wrote an essay called "Moving Past Lovecraft" in which he objected to what he called the adulation, imitation, fetishizing, and commodification of H. P. Lovecraft. He wrote that soon after his wife, Ann VanderMeer, resigned as editor of Weird Tales magazine. There was a controversy and some conflict in all of that. One of the principals, Marvin Kaye, has since died. Mr. Kaye was without a doubt an admirer of Lovecraft and the old Weird Tales. He was born less than a year after Lovecraft died. You could say that he had come to contemporary weird fiction from out of its past.

The 100th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, published in 2023, is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge, lets us know that cosmic horror is a synonym of Lovecraftian horror. All three essays in the Cosmic Horror Issue mention Lovecraft. One of the essays and one of the stories begin with epigraphs from his pen. Several of the stories have Lovecraftian themes, content, props, motifs, and so on. Although Jeff VanderMeer urged us to move past Lovecraft, we never have. It looks like he failed in his effort . . .

Except that there is an illustration in Weird Tales #367 that seems to acknowledge one of his complaints against contemporary authors who continue to admire, imitate, fetishize, and most especially commodify Lovecraft, his works, his concepts, and his approach to weird fiction. The unsigned illustration is the last to appear in the Cosmic Horror Issue and occupies the last page. It has the look of a trompe-l'œil painting and shows an album cover resting on a woodgrain tabletop. The album cover is a takeoff of Nevermind by Nirvana. It shows a larval Cthulhu swimming after a hundred dollar bill on the end of a hook. The illustration is ironic, even cynical. It's curious that the editor and publisher of Weird Tales would print it. They seem to recognize that they and many of their authors are chasing after Cthulhu cash and Lovecraft lucre. Evidently they don't feel any shame or embarrassment in that. They would be laughing to the bank except that I don't think Weird Tales is much of a moneymaking operation. Maybe I'm wrong.

I'm not exactly on Jeff VanderMeer's side in this, but you have to admit that an awful lot of writers, artists, and other creators, not just now but for the past many decades, probably going back to the 1940s, are milking a cash cow and will no doubt continue to do so for as long as they can. It would be better, I think, if writers would put the cow away and create something new and original. But again, I don't think they're up to it. It's a lot easier to copy and imitate things created by others and to go on doing that for all of your life. And that's what our popular culture has become, a mix of imitation, adaptation, remakes, sequels, prequels, pastiches, and, worst of all, shameless copying and outright theft of other people's ideas. It's no wonder there is so much product placement in the Cosmic Horror Issue, for the fiction itself and all of its themes and content have become commercial products. Cosmic Horror, like so many other genre names, has become a brand, and the authors writing in these genres have seemingly become hucksters and exploiters.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales #367-The Eyrie

The first installment of "The Eyrie" appeared in the first issue of Weird Tales, published in March 1923. It began as a way for the editor--then Edwin Baird--to communicate with readers and for them to communicate with him, and with each other. For decades the magazine recognized that it would live or die by its readers. It respected its readers, invited them to write, published what they wrote, weighed their tastes and choices, asked their opinions, and invited them to submit their own works for possible publication. H.P. Lovecraft was among the authors who had a letter in "The Eyrie" before he had a story in what was then and for a long time afterwards rightly called "The Unique Magazine."

There is an installment of "The Eyrie" in Weird Tales #367, ostensibly published one hundred years and two months later, in May 2023. There aren't any letters or excerpts from letters. This installment is for the editor alone. He is Philadelphia-born Jonathan Maberry, who, in addition to being an author, is involved in television and comic books. He has also written movie and TV tie-in books. His essay is entitled "Cosmic Horror and Weird Tales Go Hand-in-Tentacle." It's 23 column-inches long, or a little more than 1-1/3 pages. About 3-1/2 column-inches, or about 15 percent of the total length, is a list of authors. As I have written before, lists are not writing. Anyone can make a list. Even AI can make a list. At their best, which isn't very good, lists are filler. At their worst, they're namedropping. Either way, they're not very useful, although a name-dropper at least does us the service of letting us know what kind of person he is (or may be).

I think we should all admit that Lovecraft himself was something of a name-dropper. He wrote a signature story called "The Outsider," but his namedropping appears to have been an attempt to show himself as an insider, as someone with some special inside knowledge, and because of that, perhaps some special status. I think he was insecure or lacking in self-esteem in his personal life. Maybe these were ways of building himself up. In any case, there are lots of inside jokes and self-references in his work, as well as in the works of his circle. Some of that is okay. A lot of it is too cute or even annoying. So maybe Lovecraft made the beginnings of self-references and meta-references in weird fiction, in which case the weird fiction of today is simply a continuation of Lovecraft, even if some people are still trying to move past him.

Most of Mr. Maberry's essay is a discussion of what is called cosmic horror. (Wikipedia has an entry on that term, the Online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction apparently does not.) At least we have that. He uses three variations on his term, "dark fiction," "dark cosmicism," and "dark, weird fiction." Writers, editors, and critics of weird fiction today love their dark.

I commented the other day on the emphasis in genre fiction on the naming and claiming of genres and sub-genres. That continues here. These genres and sub-genres are not very often defined very well, and there is little if any literary theory, analysis, or criticism behind them. The naming seems to be the important part, and because of that, the names of genres and sub-genres have become more or less brands. Call it genrefication. And because they have been divided so finely--that process continues apace--they confine themselves to ever-smaller niches within the marketplace. The authors, editors, and critics involved in genre fiction have taken to trading in brandnames the way an advertising agency trades in the names of commercial products and services. The resulting branded products--genres and sub-genres of fiction--are placed on a shelf for our consideration, all lined up next to each other and each with a slightly different list of ingredients than the next. Anyway, I hope you like dark, because there's a lot of that. To use one of Lovecraft's favorite words, such a fascination with dark seems puerile to me.

The long-dead authors behind these genres and sub-genres have also become brandnames. Lovecraft is chief among them, but there are others. (Maybe lists of authors double as lists of ingredients. Or maybe lists of descriptors--"dark," "dark weird," "new weird," "dark fantasy"--let us know the ingredients of each branded product.) Robert W. Chambers has been added to the list of brandname authors in recent years. He and Lovecraft are in fact the first two brandname authors mentioned in Mr. Maberry's essay. Edgar Allan Poe comes next, but Poe seems to me to be an author so prominent and so significant in our literature that he defies branding, even if we have at hand the word Poesque. (Blogger doesn't like it though.) Poe has been commercialized, of course. That happened especially in the early 1960s with Roger Corman's several Poesque films, one of which, The Haunted Palace (1963), is actually Lovecraftian in origin.

It's worth noting here that Jonathan Maberry writes that Lovecraft "namechecked" Chambers, that he "borrowed" from Poe, and that he "leaned into Poe's use of a 'Gainex ending'." (p. 2) (According to the website TV Tropes, the term is actually "Gainax ending.") So again, maybe all of these meta-references began with Lovecraft. Those who continue with them today may be working further in what are called "tropes," which are so common in weird fiction, especially in Lovecraftian fiction. (See the previous parenthetical statement regarding tropes. Mr. Maberry uses the word trope in his essay by the way.) They may also be continuing and compounding some of Lovecraft's literary offenses, which are, we should also admit, manifold.

One "trope" that has become one of the tropiest of tropes is the use of tentacles in weird fiction. There are tentacles on the front cover, in Mr. Maberry's title, in several illustrations and advertisements inside, and, in miniature, at every break in prose in the interior. Tentacles return on the cover of the most recent issue of Weird Tales, the Occult Detective Issue, published in 2024, apparently only as a digital rather than an analog product. That's a shame. I'd like to have an issue in print and have no use for a digital version. Anyway, tentacles have become kind of tiresome, I think. What's next, tentacled zombies?

There are what I call 21st-century inanities in the Cosmic Horror Issue. The first of these, I think, is "leaned into." It appears in this introductory essay. There will be more. Be ready to block them out if you can. There are also misspellings, misused words, improper tenses, and inconsistencies in Weird Tales #367. It used to be that these were typographical errors, but there's no such thing as a typesetter anymore. Or more accurately, in this digital/Internet age the author is his or her own typesetter. There isn't any linotype operator standing between him and the printed page. (Remember, everything now is do-it-yourself.) If he or she gets it wrong, it's up to the proofreader or editor to catch the error. If it isn't caught, that is in the end the fault of the editor. And every editor should know that he or she should show his or her work to another editor before putting it into print. That way errors--such as the misused word "therefor" (p. 3, col. 1)--are caught and corrected before they can start any trouble.

Like I said, there is namedropping or the use of brandnames in "The Eyrie." That includes the titles of several movies. As I pointed out last time, many of the authors in this issue have worked in movies and television in one capacity or another. I have made a point before that the first generations of weird-fictional authors were formed before there were movies. They had a certain sensibility that must have been pretty well wiped out once people--especially young people, budding authors--could see stories projected onto the silver screen rather than simply read them on paper. That same kind of thing happened again once television arrived in American homes in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It probably happened again when people began playing video games and computer games. Maybe this is another kind of stepping down. And now I think that what has been done can probably never be undone. We will never go back to the written word as the formative influence upon young writers. (Reading is active. Watching is more nearly passive.) And so writers of certain generations have come to think in cinematic terms--perhaps more accurately in series-TV terms--when they are imagining and writing their fictions. The dream of every one of them is no doubt to have his or her creations adapted to screen. Once that happens, he can put the drudgery, anonymity, and penury of prose-writing behind him. Like the Beverly Hillbillies, she can look forward to living in a land of swimming pools and movie stars.

And now it occurs to me that there are two kinds of screens involved in all of this, actually four. These are the analog movie screen (which is not electronic), the analog TV screen, the digital TV screen, both of which are electronic, and the digital movie screen, which is basically, I think, just a giant digital/electronic TV screen. If analog forms and media are closer to reality, thus closer to us, than are any digital/electronic equivalents, then old-fashioned movies, committed to film and projected onto a screen strictly by analog processes, stand alone here. And maybe that's why they are so powerful in our imaginations and why film--pioneered in this country and having reached many of its greatest pinnacles here--is one of the truly great new art forms, possibly the only one. In France, it was the Seventh Art. In America, it is or was, according to Gilbert Seldes, one of the seven lively arts. By the way, his book of that title was first published one hundred years ago as I write this.

(And now I see as I look at a list of movies released in 1924 that Jew-hatred was a subject then, just as it is now--this very week in fact--and that there were then, as there are now, people who wish to see Jews expelled from the company of non-Jews, "company" being sometimes a euphemism for "the earth." If you want to know what I'm talking about, read for yourself about the 1924 Austrian film Die Stadt ohne Juden--The City Without Jews. Understand, too, that this film is Utopian, or Dystopian, depending on whether you find yourself on the sharp or blunt end of the bayonet.)

And so movies have a place in the introductory essay of this story magazine of 2023. You can decide for yourself whether that's appropriate. (Mr. Maberry mentions moviemaker George Romero in his essay. He has also written a book with George Romero. That sounds like product placement or a subliminal/commercial message to me. In either case, it's meta.) Like I said, every genre author born after a certain year no doubt has as his or her most fervent wish to write for the electronic screen. Failing that, he or she wants to break into comic books, which are or have become a poor man's kind of filmmaking. We shouldn't discount at all the writer's drive to build himself up, to improve her status. The writer of real personal power and confidence is probably a rarity. (Wallace Stegner might have been one.) If writers of prose can have their works adapted to movies, TV, or comic books, or if they can work in those forms as scriptwriters, directors, producers, and so on, then they can earn for themselves the esteem, better yet the envy, of their fellows. They can leave the slums and garrets of prose-writing behind them. Just like anybody else, writers need to pay their bills, but you can't put a dollar figure on social climbing and the simple ego-boost that comes from improved status.

(We should remember here that movies and comic strips are very closely related in their history and development and that they were born at about the same time, that is, in about 1895-1896. Pulp magazines are also from that period. This is one of the reasons why I call the period 1895-1896 the birth years of popular culture in America. The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, was also published in 1895, and so maybe cosmic horror as a sub-genre, or sub-sub-genre, is of the same vintage.)

I wrote about the possible motivations and the possible process behind Weird Tales #367. Now, with "The Eyrie," we have at least a partial answer. Jonathan Maberry writes:

     I invited a bunch of my outside-the box writer friends to bring new thought, new interpretations, new invention to their original works. (p. 3)

I'm not sure that I see much that is new in this issue. There's actually a lot that is old, conventional, and tropey. A lot of people who live inside of boxes like to think of themselves as living outside. I guess that helps them feel better about themselves. But at least we can see now that Weird Tales #367 is, more or less, a vanity project or a creation of a sort of clique. Their box is actually a sandbox. Some, though not all, of the authors in this issue are inside of it, I think. It must be cramped in there. To use the metaphor in a different way, it looks as though Mr. Maberry reached into the box of his friends and pulled out some of their stories, which are really nothing new under the sun, or not much anyway. (I'll have more on possible new things, such as they are, later in this series.) There are other writers in this country and abroad, people who truly are--I think and I hope--living and writing outside of boxes. Can we read their work? Can Weird Tales be for the rest of us, too? Or is it only for people in the box?

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The Last of Colloids & Tentacles

A colloid is a suspension of one or more substances in another. Two thirds of the ingredients of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich are colloids. A long time ago, I knew a guy who liked banana and mayonnaise sandwiches. (They smelled like house paint.) Only one third of his ingredients--mayonnaise--is colloidal. Protoplasm is a colloid, too, so when John Corliss Cranmer's giant amoeba gulped down first his daughter-in-law, then his son, people were the meal and the colloid was the eater of the meal. But then the people were made of cells brimming with protoplasm, too, and so it was a case of one big colloidal mass eating lots of little ones--if you're a reductionist, that is.

The word colloid is from the French, originally from the Greek. It means "a substance in a gelatinous or gluey state," originally, simply, "glue." Colloid as a word and a scientific concept is from the mid-nineteenth century, as so many things in our daily lives and so many of the ideas in our busy little brains are. There are other gluey concepts in science, collagen, for example, also the subatomic particles called gluons. There are also gluey crafts and gluey art forms. The collage is the most obvious example of these.

People have made collages for a long, long time, but the collage as a work of art dates from the modern period, maybe from the eighteenth century, certainly no later than the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso made collages and coined the term papier collé. Those two artists, along with Juan Gris, were originators first of analytical cubism, then of synthetic cubism. In analytical cubism, the artist looks at his or her subject from many different points if view. That's why, in a work by Picasso for example, you can see both eyes in a portrait seemingly done in profile. So, no, Picasso's people are not part flounder. In synthetic cubism--I think a more playful and not so mathematically exacting variation--a work of cubistic art is synthesized by gluing together scraps and cuttings of paper, thus the collage or papier collé. I guess making collages would have been hard to do before there was a mass and popular press as a source of material.

In moving towards synthesis, or what we might call literary collage, modern authors followed modern artists, I think. The art seems to have come first--synthetic cubism was in flower, if you can call it that, in 1912-1914. Then came the literary works, "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, for example, in 1922, Show Girl by J.P. McEvoy in 1928, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy in 1930-1936. I think we can include "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928) in that list, too. Several stories in the first issue of Weird Tales (Mar. 1923) include notes, clippings, diary entries, and so forth, as if the story were a scrapbook or a collage. That kind of thing would continue in future issues.

"The Call of Cthulhu" also has an analytical approach, as do other works of weird fiction that refer or allude to weird geometries, outré mathematics, and multiple dimensions. Maybe pulp fiction wasn't very far behind mainstream literature in the 1910s-1930s in its move towards modernism. But maybe the pulp fiction genres--especially science fiction--were a little bit ahead because they were in such close contact with the scientific developments of their time. Mainstream authors of the early twentieth century could disregard science. F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck didn't write science fiction. But then science and the future barged into the room and Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood did and have. How times change.

There will be more on Ms. Atwood in a minute.

Dr. Frankenstein made a kind of collage using parts from different bodies, plus an Abby Normal brain. His goal was the synthesis of life from non-life. "I had worked hard for nearly two years," he wrote, "for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body." Lightning was the literal spark of life by which he would do it. And so his monster lived. A long line of proto-scientists, semi-scientists, pseudoscientists, and maybe the rarest kind, real scientists, has proposed that early in the earth's history lightning infused life in what they have called the primordial soup or primordial ooze, ooze being a species of colloid. Anthony M. Rud seems to have alluded to the primordial ooze--or jelly in H.G. Wells' formulation--in his story "Ooze" (Weird Tales, March 1923). Since the early nineteenth century, real-life scientists seem to have followed the example of Victor Frankenstein. We, the world over, recently had a deadly encounter with their Frankensteinian brand of science in the form of a lowly virus raised to the top of a Chinese/U.S. government-built Tower of Babel. They'll do it again. We can be sure of that. Next time it's likely to be worse, but that will be good for them because they can take more of what is ours in the process.

Life arising from non-life, called spontaneous generation, was debunked a long time ago. But I guess debunked things don't always stay that way. For example, there are yet again people who believe that a person can change his or her bodily form by some magical process of mind or by a series of practices they call "care," practices that the rest of us can only consider criminal, immoral, and unethical mutilations of the human body, a kind of witch-doctory or pseudo-medical falling-back on superstition, ultimately a literal diabolism. People who can supposedly transform themselves used to be called shape-shifters or skin-walkers, and they did what they did by supernatural processes. Now they go by a different name and we're supposed to believe that there is science behind it.

From the moment we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have believed ourselves to be as gods and to hold in our hands godlike power, godlike authority, and godlike wisdom. Our punishment was expulsion from the Garden and a realization of death. The difference is that we once knew shame and walked in shame, out of the gates and into exile. Now there isn't any shame, only pride, or Pride as it is now capitalized. Now we walk in history every day, as the worst among us might say. Anyway, I guess if we're gods, we can create and mold bodies and parts of bodies, just as Dr. Frankenstein did. In creating our modern-day monster, we will fashion his/her whole body--his veins, his feet, his hands, his organs--everything, including a Frankenstein's schwanzstucker made from the flesh of her forearm--according to our own whims. It won't be real, but we will be required to call it real and her a man. It will in fact be grotesque, a monstrous simulacrum, at once a symbol and a manifestation of our reaching into hell in our efforts to reach into heaven, where we believe we are or shall be enthroned. And, no, she's not gonna be very popular because of it.

Margaret Atwood, who has been called a TERF because she knows what everybody in the whole history of the world knew until ten minutes ago, famously said, "Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space." As we know, squids are cephalopods and the bearers of tentacles. So Ms. Atwood has offended not only people who don't know what a woman is, but she has probably also offended a lot of science fiction fans with her opinions on these things. If you're an offended Star Wars fan, though, you might want to just slink away, the reason being that in the Star Wars universe, there is a literal talking squid. His title is Admiral and his name is Ackbar, and though his tentacles are small (they're more like the barbels of a catfish), he is a member of a race called the Mon Calamari, meaning, in una bella lingua of a faraway planet spinning on its axis a long, long time in the future, squid. (The noun is Italian, the possessive pronoun French.)

There are other tentacled aliens in the Star Wars universe. Oola is one. Ahsoka is another. They have tentacles coming out of their heads. The Thermians in Galaxy Quest (1999) are, in their true form, tentacled. They are one form but take another. Call them trans, I guess. Cthulhu of course has tentacles. In Frank Frazetta's interior illustration for The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1922), there are tentacled heads, called Kaldanes in the story, that frighten and horrify Tara of Helium. In Gino d'Achille's  cover version, the Kaldanes are more spider-like. I believe the Kaldanes have both kinds of members, though, both tentacles and jointed legs. Maybe a Burroughs fan can let us know for sure. That reaching down through the neck to control a host body is also in The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951), the Star Trek Episode "Operation -- Annihilate!" (1967), and, if I remember right, a skit on SCTV in which cabbage leaves attach themselves to the backs of people's heads. In the Star Trek episode at least, the controlling aliens are colloidal, made by the prop master from bags of fake vomit. By the way, the ninth book in Burroughs' Mars series is The Synthetic Men of Mars, originally published in 1939, and so we have another example of Frankensteinian synthesis in genre fiction.

Colloids are sometimes fun. Give a child a bottle of Elmer's Glue-All along with some construction paper and glitter and see how she entertains herself. But in science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction, colloids are more often gross, nasty, disgusting, and revolting--when they are not creeping, crawling, encroaching, and deadly in the way shoggoths or the Blob is. We have a different reaction to tentacled creatures, owing, I think, to our hundred-thousand-year experience with them. They are real, discrete, recognizable, nameable, alive. They look back at us with the biggest eyes in nature. And the smartest of them are very smart. More than any of that, though, they seem alien in their star-shaped or radially symmetrical bodies. It's no wonder tentacled creatures became the aliens of science fiction, or more accurately, why science fiction authors, beginning with H.G. Wells, would have fashioned the tentacled creatures of earth into aliens from outer space. Maybe we have atavistic memories of when octopuses first came to our planet, raining down on us in their iron spaceships.

We were made in the image of our Creator, and so we wish to create, thus our art and literature, among so many other great and wonderful things, including most of all love, which allows us an escape into eternity. Where we make our mistake is in believing we can create or re-create the things that he first created. And so Frankensteinian scientists, engineers, and technicians are busy. They believe they can create life (or that life was created) from non-life. They believe they can alter unalterable facts about human nature, human anatomy, and human biology. They believe they can make of us something beyond human, better than human, other than human, transhuman. They're working on synthesizing new forms from fragments of previously existing ones. The coronavirus and a million dead are one result of that. The supposedly counteractive "vaccine" and a million more dead are another. They also believe they can transfer the human mind into a machine, thus surviving their own deaths.* In fact, they appear to see little difference between the ghost and the machine. One can be the other. One is the other. And so we will soon have machines taking the place of human beings. Soon after that, our machines will probably enslave or kill us. If you have never read "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison (1967), you probably should, like right now. It may give you a glimpse into our caliginous--not collagenous but caliginous--future. Anyway, thanks, scientists, but ultimately, thanks, all of us, for we have all done this. Scientists--others, too--are only at the vanguard of our limitless depravity in our fallen state. We fall. The asymptotic curve of our pursuit of perfection--of a perfect and limitless depravity--moves forever upwards.

-----

*Having eaten the forbidden fruit, they believe that the knowledge they have thereby gained will reopen the gates and allow them back into the Garden.

"To Tara's horror, the headless body moved, took the hideous head in its hands and set it on its shoulders." Illustration by Frank Frazetta from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

John Jakes (1932-2023)

Author, Advertising Copywriter
Born March 31, 1932, Chicago, Illinois
Died March 11, 2023, Sarasota, Florida

John Jakes has died. Known for his vastly popular historical novels, the late Mr. Jakes got his start as an author of science fiction and fantasy stories. His first published story was "The Dreaming Trees" in Fantastic Adventures, November 1950. According to Isaac Asimov, the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in 1950. If that's the measure, then John Jakes just barely slipped in before that age came to an end.

John Jakes could have been in Weird Tales, but he wasn't. By the time "The Unique Magazine" folded, he had had nearly three dozen of his stories published, in Fantastic Adventures, Amazing Stories, Super Science Stories, Planet Stories, Imagination, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Space Science Fiction, Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader, Rocket Stories, and Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy. He also wrote Westerns and crime and detective stories. Weird Tales was on its way down in the 1950s, while magazine science fiction was taking off. You could hardly have blamed John Jakes for choosing one over the other. (Or maybe he submitted stories to Weird Tales but was turned down.) He certainly wasn't above writing stories of fantasy. A later phase of his career proved as much.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Jakes began writing stories of a yellow-haired warrior loose in a world of monsters and magic. In his "Prefatory Note" to Brak the Barbarian (1968), he acknowledged writing his Brak stories in the shadow of Robert E. Howard. He did so not out of cupidity, as a letter writer to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination had suggested. "My motive for giving birth to Brak and his parallel universe on an old black Underwood was much simpler," the author explained. "There just are not enough stories of this kind to go around any more; not enough, anyway, to please me." And so he wrote.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination published the first Brak story, "Devils in the Walls," in May 1963. Eight more followed, plus several novels and collections of stories, some of which are variants of the original eight stories. I haven't done a close enough study of the Brak stories to say just how many of them there are, but it looks like there are twelve. Also, we shouldn't forget a Brak comic book story, "Spell of the Dragon," with a script by Dan Adkins and John Jakes and artwork by Adkins, Val Mayerik, and Al Milgrom, published in Marvel Comics' Chamber of Chills #2  in January 1973. That makes thirteen.

I have compiled the following lists from information in The FictionMags Index, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and Wikipedia, and by consulting my own collection of Brak books:

Brak Stories by John Jakes:

• "Devils in the Walls" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (May 1963)
•  "Witch of the Four Winds" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (serial, Nov.-Dec. 1963)
•  "When the Idols Walked" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (serial, Aug.-Sept. 1964)
•  "The Girl in the Gem" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Jan. 1965)
•  "The Pillars of Chambalor" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Mar. 1965)
•  "The Silk of Shaitan" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Apr. 1965)
•  "The Mirror of Wizardry" in Worlds of Fantasy, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1968)
•  "Ghoul’s Garden" in Flashing Swords! #2, edited by Lin Carter (1973)
•  "Storm in a Bottle" in Flashing Swords! #4, edited by Lin Carter (1977)

Brak Books by John Jakes:

• Brak the Barbarian (1968), collecting "The Unspeakable Shrine," "Flame Face," "The Courts of the Conjurer" (variant of "The Silk of Shaitan"), "Ghosts of Stone" (variant of "The Pillars of Chambalor"), and "The Barge of Souls"  
• Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress (1969), originally "Witch of the Four Winds"
• Brak the Barbarian Versus the Mark of the Demons (1970)
• When the Idols Walked (1978), originally "When the Idols Walked"
• The Fortunes of Brak (1980), collecting "Devils in the Walls," "Ghoul's Garden," "The Girl in the Gem," "Brak in Chains" (variant of "Storm in a Bottle"), and "The Mirror of Wizardry"

I have stopped before the current age of non-books called "books" began.

John Jakes was born in Chicago; graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1953; earned his masters degree at Ohio State University; and worked as an advertising copywriter in Dayton, Ohio, before setting off in 1971 to become a full-time author. (His prefaces were dispatched from Kettering, Ohio.) He sold millions of books from the 1970s to the 1990s, and several of his historical novels were adapted to TV miniseries. He lived on Bird Key in Sarasota, Florida, and died in Sarasota on March 11, 2023. Today would have been his ninety-first birthday. We send condolences to his family, wish John Jakes a happy birthday, and say thank you to him for the reading pleasure he has given the world.

* * *

I wrote about John Jakes in my essay "They Should Have Been in Weird Tales," published in The Weird Tales Story, Expanded and Enhanced, edited by Robert Weinberg and Bob McLain (2021).

Fantastic Stories of Imagination, May 1963. Cover story: "Devils in the Walls" by John Jakes. Cover art by Vernon Kramer.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination, January 1965. Cover story: "The Girl in the Gem" by John Jakes. Cover art by Ed Emshwiller. Notice the tentacles in the lower right.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination, March 1965. Cover story: "The Pillars of Chambalor" by John Jakes. Cover art by Gray Morrow.

Brak the Barbarian (1968), with cover art by Frank Frazetta.

Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress (1969), with arresting cover art by Frazetta.

Brak the Barbarian Versus the Mark of the Demons (1970), with cover art by Michael Leonard.

Brak vs. the Sorceress (1977), with cover art by Charles Moll.

Brak vs. the Mark of the Demons (1977), again with cover art by Mr. Moll.

The Fantastic Swordsmen (1967) with a cover story "The Girl in the Gem" by John Jakes and cover art by his friend, Jack Gaughan. Again there are tentacles.

Flashing Swords #2 (1973), with cover art by Frazetta illustrating "Ghoul's Garden" by John Jakes.

Thanks to my correspondent for letting me know about the passing of John Jakes.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Ooze, Blobs, Jellies, & Slime in Weird Fiction

By the late nineteenth century, then, there seems to have been an image or awareness of the ooze and slime that lay at the bottom of the world's oceans. If the 1890s were the beginnings of our current popular culture, then maybe ooze made its debut in genre fiction during that same decade. I can't say that that's true, but I have an example, Rudyard Kipling's short story "A Matter of Fact," from People magazine, 1892, and collected in Many Inventions in 1893.

"A Matter of Fact" is more than just one thing. It's a sea story, a weird tale, an early example of cryptozoological fiction, and a story about journalists and journalism. In that way, "A Matter of Fact" might be a little metafictional, just as is "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. Kipling's story falls into two parts. The first takes place at sea, in the kind of isolation necessary for a weird narrative to play out. The second part is set on sober land. The seagoing part of "A Matter of Fact" is exciting, suspenseful, and filled with sensations of awe and terror. You can almost believe that Kipling really did witness the death of a sea serpent caused by the eruption of an undersea volcano. The landed part consists mainly of conversations among the three journalists who were witnesses to this event. That part of the story is ironic and a little humorous. If you're an American, prepare to be poked a little.

There is both ooze and slime in "A Matter of Fact":

The gray ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back, and poured away in sluices. [. . .] Then the death-struggle began, with crampings and twistings and jerkings of the white bulk to and fro, till our little steamer rolled again, and each gray wave coated her plates with the gray slime.

* * *

In July 1917, twenty-six-year-old H.P. Lovecraft wrote "Dagon," one of his first published short stories. It's the tale of a man who, having escaped in a boat from German sea-raiders, finds himself on what can only be an upthrust stretch of seabed:

When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away. [. . .] There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.

There's a lot of namedropping in "Dagon." In the space of a couple of thousand words, Lovecraft invoked Gustave Doré, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton and alluded to John Milton. There's a lot of word-dropping, too. For example:

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

And: 

Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.

And:

Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.

My advice to young (and sometimes middle-aged) Lovecraft: try. Please just try.

Namedropping is not storytelling. (Nor is it analysis or criticism.) Word-dropping is also not storytelling. Words can sometimes act as talismans. They may have magical power in them. But certain kinds of words and phrases are not suitable substitutes for real description and real expression. What, for example, is "the fathomless chaos of eternal night"? If you compare "Dagon"--an early work to be sure--to "A Matter of Fact" you can easily see that Lovecraft could have learned a thing or two by reading Kipling.

"Dagon" was first published in The Vagrant #11 in November 1919. It was reprinted in Weird Tales in October 1923, Lovecraft's first story in "The Unique Magazine." It was reprinted again in January 1936 and November 1951. Call it a dry run--or maybe a wet, slimy run--for "The Call of Cthulhu."

* * *

"The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft is from 1926 and was published in Weird Tales in February 1928. It has slime:

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone [. . .].

There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults [. . .].

So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.

And ooze:

Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.

Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror--the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen.

The slime and ooze wasn't alive just yet. That would come soon enough.

* * *

Shoggoths

Lovecraft first described shoggoths in detail in his novella At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931 and published as a serial in Astounding Stories in February-March-April 1936. Shoggoths are plastic, protoplasmic, and amoeba-like. They make me think of the giant amoeba in "Ooze":

They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles; and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion.

 As works of the imagination, however, shoggoths seem to go farther back than that:

It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they [the Old Ones] first created earth-life--using available substances according to long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets; having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the "shoggoths" in his frightful Necronomicon [. . .]. [Emphasis added.]

More explicitly:

The steady trend down the ages [Lovecraft wrote] was from water to land; a movement encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which successful sea-life depended. With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost; so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem. [Emphasis added.]

So, like urschleim and Bathybius, like primordial slime and primordial ooze, first of pre-science, then of pseudoscience, shoggoths were created under the sea from nonliving matter. There are lots of oozy and slimy words attached to shoggoths, also lots of colloidal words. Lovecraft's descriptions of them make me think of fruitcake batter or those Jello salads that people used to make using mini marshmallows, Maraschino cherries, and mandarin orange slices.

* * *

Ubbo-Sathla in Clark Ashton Smith's story of the same name (Weird Tales, July 1933), isn't a shoggoth, but it has shoggoth-like qualities. In a kind of body-vision, a man named Tregardis travels back through the aeons to a time before time:

Through years and ages of the ophidian era it [i.e., his de-evolving body] returned, and was a thing that crawled in the ooze, that had not yet learned to think and dream and build. And the time came when there was no longer a continent, but only a vast, chaotic marsh, a sea of slime, without limit or horizon, that seethed with a blind writhing of amorphous vapors.
     There, in the gray beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the pre-mundane gods.

The image of a limitless sea of slime recalls the upthrust seabed in "Dagon." Moreover, as "a vast, chaotic marsh, a sea of slime," an oozy place in which life is generated, beginning with "amebic forms," it is an almost perfect evocation of the primordial ooze, primordial slime, primordial soup, or warm little pool of pre-science, pseudoscience, and unsupported or evidence-free "science" that we seem to have taken for granted for a very long time now. Tregardis' regression through evolutionary time had precedent in Otis Adelbert Kline's serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," which is also about a kind of ooze, slime, or plasm.

* * *

Shoggoths came back in "Notebook Found in an Deserted House" by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, May 1951):

I looked back at the big black thing that was a shoggoth. I looked back as it kep swelling and growing. I guess I told about how it could change shape, and how big it got.

It was real tall and all inky-black, without any particular shape except a lot of black ropes with ends like hoofs on it. I mean, it had a shape but it kep changing--all bulgy and squirming into different sizes. They was a lot of mouths all over the thing like puckered up leaves on branches.

That's as close as I can come. The mouths was like leaves and the whole thing was like a tree in the wind, a black tree with lots of branches trailing the ground, and a whole lot of roots ending in hoofs. And that green slime dribbling out of the mouths and down the legs was like sap!

Lovecraft didn't mention hooves, but if you're going to live on land, you might need them. Pseudopodia are good only in a liquid medium.

* * *

In "Slime" by Joseph Payne Brennan (Weird Tales, Mar. 1953), we have the fullest, clearest, and most detailed description yet of living ooze or living slime, including its origins. It's hard to believe that Brennan did not write his story in full awareness of the history of ooze and slime, including a possible reading of "Ooze." His story begins:

     It was a great gray-black hood of horror moving over the floor of the sea. It slid through the soft ooze like a monstrous mantle of slime obscenely animated with questing life. It was by turns viscid and fluid. At times it flattened out and flowed through the carpet of mud like an inky pool; occasionally it paused, seeming to shrink in upon itself, and reared up out of the ooze until it resembled an irregular cone or a gigantic hood. Although it possessed no eyes, it had a marvelously developed sense of touch, and it possessed a sensitivity to minute vibrations which was almost akin to telepathy. It was plastic, essentially shapeless. It could shoot out long tentacles, until it bore a resemblance to a nightmare squid or a huge starfish; it could retract itself into a round flattened disk, or squeeze into an irregular hunched shape so that it looked like a black boulder sunk on the bottom of the sea.
     It had prowled the black water endlessly. It had been formed when the earth and the seas were young; it was almost as old as the ocean itself. It moved through a night which had no beginning and no dissolution. The black sea basin where it lurked had been dark since the world began--an environment only a little less inimical than the stupendous gulfs of interplanetary space. 

Everything would have been fine for us surface-dwellers . . .

     Had it not been for a vast volcanic upheaval on the bottom of the ocean basin, the black horror would have crept out its entire existence on the silent sea ooze without ever manifesting its hideous powers to mankind.
     Fate, in the form of a violent subterranean explosion, covering huge areas of the ocean's floor, hurled it out of its black slime world and sent it spinning toward the surface.

So we have come full circle, beginning with Kipling's "A Matter of Fact," then on to Lovecraft's "Dagon" and "The Call of Cthulhu," finally to "Slime," for each involves a submarine disturbance of one kind or another that raises something from the ocean floor to the surface. (The dinosaur in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released in 1953, is also awakened by a disturbance at sea.) Here's another full circle: Brennan's monster arrives on land in a swamp:

     Along with scattered ash, pumice and the puffed bodies of dead fish, the black horror was hurled toward a beach. The huge waves carried it more than a mile inland, far beyond the strip of sandy shore, and deposited it in the midst of a deep brackish swamp area.

And at last we have an overt example of sea-ooze, Brennan's slime monster, becoming the swamp monster of American popular culture.

Astounding Stories, February 1936. Cover story: "At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Cover art by Howard V. Brown. This was the first installment of Lovecraft's novella and depicts, I believe for the first time, a shoggoth, a colloidal kind of creature made from inorganic matter on the ocean floor, what Kipling referred to in his poem "The Deep-Sea Cables" as "the womb of the world." Like the giant amoeba in Anthony Rud's "Ooze," they escaped from their creators and captors to wreak havoc upon the world. After their experiences in Antarctica, these polar explorers are likely to become bipolar explorers.

By the way, the swamp creature on the cover of Beware #13 (Jan. 1953), which I showed the other day, looks a lot like Brown's shoggoth shown here.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Origins of Ooze-Part Three

Here's another long one, but just remember: we're going back billions of years here.

* * *

Primordial ooze, primordial slime, and primordial soup have become accepted terms and accepted concepts, even though they describe something that no one has ever observed in nature nor created or recreated in a laboratory. Like the ether of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these concepts are based on lots of assumptions, furthermore in the absence of any evidence or any real knowledge regarding a persistent and nagging scientific problem. In the case of ether, the problem involved the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space. In the case of primordial ooze, the problem has to do with the origins of life on earth. Nobody of a scientific mind seems to question the idea that life here originated in ooze. A belief in its existence would appear dogmatic.

So what are the origins of ooze? Well, the earliest use of the expression "primordial ooze" that I have found in American newspapers is from November 9, 1899, in reference to Sir John Murray's explorations of the ocean floor on board the HMS Challenger. (Sir John Murray, 1841-1914.) The article I found (in the first of its many appearances in stateside papers) is "Floor of the Sea" in the Washington, D.C., Beacon. In its original, the article was in the London Spectator and was written by F.T. Bullen. Bullen's article treats "primordial ooze" as if knowledge of the concept was common. Evidently, even in 1899, it had been around for a while. Murray is considered the father of oceanography. He has an octopus named after him, Cirrothauma murrayi, thus he has connections both to cephalopods and slime. If you're an oceanographer, you'll have that.

The earliest occurrence of "primordial slime" that I have found is in a review of a scientific article called "Bathybius and the Moneres" [sic] by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) in Popular Science Monthly, October 1877. The review, entitled simply "Periodicals," is in the Boston Evening Transcript, October 4, 1877, page 6. In it, reference is made to Haeckel's discovery of a "peculiar slimy substance" on the Mediterranean seafloor. Haeckel called this substance Bathybius or "The Primordial Slime of the Sea Depths." It was supposed to have been a substance that was giving rise, even in contemporary times, to life.

Mention of "Bathybius and the Moneres" leads to the article itself, entitled "Bathybius and the Moners." (I'm not sure which is the correct spelling, but even in Haeckel's article, "moneres" is the spelling used.) In that article, there is more talk of slime, ooze, Bathybius-ooze, and even amoebas. There is also an organism called Vampyrella, though I doubt it's the one with which we're familiar. Again, check the spelling.

The concept of Bathybius was older even than Haeckel's article. The stuff was supposed to have been brought up from the ocean floor during the deep-sea soundings made for the laying of the transatlantic cable in 1857. (Remember that part.) In 1868-1870, Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Haeckel went back and forth in some excitement to claim that Bathybius: a) was a type of protoplasm; b) covered the ocean floor; c) was constantly coming into being; and d) was a link between life and non-life. Scientists on board the Challenger blew lots of really big, Fearless Fosdick-sized holes in those claims. Huxley admitted his error in 1879. A poem in Punch from 1879 (see below) poked fun at the concept of Bathybius. Yet there were still people who believed in it or at least failed to question it.

To wit:

The earliest reference to "primordial soup" in an American newspaper that I have found is, surprisingly, from 1960. And guess who referred to it? Twenty-five-year-old Dr. Carl E. Sagan (1934-1996) of Yerkes Observatory, that's who! In "Life on Jupiter, Astronomer Says" (Oakland Tribune, May 11, 1960, page 11), journalist Tom Riley wrote of how Dr. Sagan had "suggested that a process of organic synthesis is going on over Jupiter's surface in much the same way as the primordial soup of earth evolved millions of years ago." Dr. Sagan famously said later that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So where was the proof of organic synthesis, either on Jupiter or on the primordial earth? To paraphrase a well-known bandito: Proof? We don't need no stinking proof! When it comes to the abiogenesis of life, the message is clear: We have faith! No evidence is needed!

By the way, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) studied biology under Thomas Huxley, and so maybe we have a line of descent for the concept of primordial ooze, from Huxley and Haeckel to Wells . . . thence to Anthony M. Rud? And from him, to lots of other creators of slime creatures, ooze monsters, and things that arise from muck, mire, and the swamplands of the earth? I can't say for sure, but I'm getting ahead of myself in any case.

In his article of October 1877, Ernst Haeckel wrote:

With this formless primordial organism of the simplest kind, which, occurring in thousands of millions, covers the sea-bottom with a living layer of slime, a new light seemed to be thrown upon one of the most difficult and most obscure problems of the history of creation--namely, the question of the origin of life upon the earth. With Bathybius, the ill-famed "Urschleim" (primordial slime) appeared to have been found, of which it had been prophetically affirmed, fifty years before, by Oken, that from it was sprung the whole world of organisms, and that this "Urschleim" itself had sprung from inorganic matter at the sea-bottom in the course of planetary development.

At last (I think) we have arrived at the origins of ooze. And they are evidently in the work of another German, a natural philosopher called Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), who wrote, in 1805:

[A]ll organic beings originate from and consist of vesicles or cells. These vesicles, when singly detached and regarded in their original process of production, are the infusorial mass or protoplasma (urschleim) whence all larger organisms fashion themselves or are evolved.

So, in the beginning there was urschleim, the first slime, the slime that is life and from which all life arises in the form of cells of protoplasm, which bind themselves to each other to form ever-higher forms through some unexplained process of genesis and evolution. And now here we are: we came out of slime, we are made of slime, and each of us carries within him or her an ocean floor, a tidal pool, a warm little pond, a swamp.

Thirteen years after Oken wrote came these words:

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. 

They're from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797-1851).

* * *

From Oken to Huxley and Haeckel to H.G. Wells, ooze, blobs, jellies, and slime found their home in the oceans, either on the ocean floor or in tidal pools. "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud is set in the piney woods and swamplands of southern Alabama. In his account of what happened at Cranmer's lodge, Rud's narrator uses ooze and similar words to refer mostly to the remnants of the scientist's giant amoeba, which perished in the enclosure that he had constructed for it after it had eaten his son, daughter-in-law, and manservant. Those remnants now lie in a disgusting, fishy-smelling residue over the grounds. But at least once, that narrator also seems to use ooze in reference to the substrate of the surrounding swampland. So, questions arise:

• Was Rud aware of the concept of primordial ooze or primordial slime as a putative source of life on earth?

• Did he move primordial ooze or primordial slime from the oceans onto land, specifically to the swamplands of the American South?

• If so, was he the first to do so? In other words, was Rud's giant amoeba the first science-fictional, weird-fictional, or pseudo-scientific swamp monster--that is, a monster that arises from the swamp--in American popular culture?

We should be clear here that Cranmer's giant amoeba didn't make itself. It did not arise spontaneously from swamp-ooze. Instead, the author Rud replaced spontaneous generation with a pseudo-scientific or science-fictional process: the amoeba was created by a super-scientist in his laboratory using rearrangement of its chromosomes.

Cranmer didn't mean to do what he had done. "Mine is the crime of presumption," he wrote in his final notebook entry. He aimed too high and because of that fell far. His science was Frankensteinian, but he was not like Dr. Frankenstein. Rud's narrator writes that John Corliss Cranmer "believed in both God and humankind." In fact it was not he, the scientist, who brought on disaster but his son, the writer, who did it. The father understood fully the danger posed by the amoeba. He instructed his son to destroy it. The son, though, was more ambitious, and more than a little foolish. He believed at some level that nature can be controlled. There is a phenomenon in the world of today of sons who lack the moral, physical, and intellectual development of their fathers. We see that all of the time. It may be an irreversible trend. The loss of the first of John Corliss Cranmer's twin beliefs might be the best explanation for that.

One more convention appears in "Ooze," that of the widowed scientist, only this one has a beautiful daughter-in-law rather than daughter. This isn't exactly hopeful science fiction though--in this case it's more like fateful weird fiction--and so they all die.

* * *

"In the womb of the world," an illustration for Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Deep-Sea Cables" drawn by William Heath Robinson; from A Song of the English (1909). That looks like ooze to me.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a near contemporary of H.G. Wells. It's safe to say that Kipling was an entirely different kind of man and artist than was Wells. Like Wells and the men who preceded him, Kipling knew about ooze and slime and the deep sea except that he wrote about these things from a nonscientific viewpoint rather than a scientific one. I don't want to sound like Garrison Keillor, but here's a poem for today by Kipling:

"The Deep-Sea Cables" (1896)
By Rudyard Kipling

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar--
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world--here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat--
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth--
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"

"The wrecks dissolve above us," by Robinson.

Here's another:

"In the Matter of One Compass" (1892)
By Rudyard Kipling

WHEN, foot to wheel and back to wind,
The helmsman dare not look behind,
But hears beyond his compass-light,
The blind bow thunder through the night,
And, like a harpstring ere it snaps,
The rigging sing beneath the caps;
  Above the shriek of storm in sail
    Or rattle of the blocks blown free,
  Set for the peace beyond the gale,
    This song the Needle sings the Sea:

Oh, drunken Wave! Oh, driving Cloud!
  Rage of the Deep and sterile Rain,
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

When leagued about the 'wildered boat
The rainbow Jellies fill and float,
And, lilting where the laver lingers,
The Starfish trips on all her fingers;
Where, 'neath his myriad spines ashock,
The Sea-egg ripples down the rock,
An orange wonder dimly guessed
From darkness where the Cuttles rest,
Moored o'er the darker deeps that hide
The blind white Sea-snake and his bride,
Who, drowsing, nose the long-lost Ships
Let down through darkness to their lips--
Safe-swung above the glassy death,
Hear what the constant Needle saith:

Oh, lisping Reef! Oh, listless Cloud,
  In slumber on a pulseless main!
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

E'en so through Tropic and through Trade,
  Awed by the shadow of new skies,
As we shall watch old planets fade
  And mark the stranger stars arise,
So, surely, back through Sun and Cloud,
  So, surely, from the outward main
By Love recalled, by God allowed,
  Shall we return--return again!
  Yea, we return--return again!

The first poem is easier for me to understand than the second, but both have imagery of the ocean and its benthic regions: ooze, slime, jellies, cuttlefish, "the blind white Sea-snake," and so on. If we consider one or both of these poems to be genre works, then we have some early examples of ooze and slime in such works.

To be continued . . .

Cirrothauma murrayi, an octopus named for Sir John Murray.

Finally, "Bathybius," a poem from Punch, reprinted in British newspapers in 1879.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley