This post is brought to you by the upcoming Steel and Stone by M. D. Jackson. This novel is made up of three parts, “Rolling Stone” which appeared in Ships of Steel last year, plus two further adventures about Stone the secret agent working with Marella, a woman he saves from invisible foes aboard a spaceliner. Later stories feature Steel’s ship Darlin’ (Darling Buds of May), a killerbot like you’ve never experienced before, as well as Marella’s adventure aboard a Niven Ring at the edge of the galaxy. All three parts combine to make a Space Adventure novel that will keep you turning pages!
The sign of great Science Fiction writer is the ability to imagine the unimaginable. This was what made Stanley G. Weinbaum an instant success with “A Martian Odyssey” (Wonder Stories, July 1934). But Weinbaum wasn’t alone in this skill. R.F. Starzl, Frank Belknap Long, Arthur K. Barnes and Raymond Z. Gallun also had it. (They don’t get as much credit as SGW but they did come later.) Gallun gave us some intriguing alien life, including his most famous series “Old Faithful” but I think there are many other stories, less well known that offer a nice range of extraterrestrial life. In “Blue Haze On Pluto” he sums up the essence of such creature creation thus:
It had seemed fantastic; but Terry realized now that it was not fantastic at all. It was natural. The outer planets beyond the orbit of Jupiter were too heatless to support fauna and flora whose protoplasm was similar to that of the fauna and flora of Earth. And so, life, ever adaptable to the conditions imposed by environment, bad taken the form of these frigid monstrosities, beautiful yet abhorrent.
“Blue Haze on Pluto” (Astounding Stories, June 1935)
The plot of “Blue Haze on Pluto” is simple enough. A space ship carrying plague medicine (Thanks again, Nome, Alaska!) crashes. Terry Sommers and an unnamed Venusian are two survivors who take the drug and attempt to cross the freezing surface of Pluto as night falls. The sheer cold makes the attempt suicide but Terry has no other choice. But before he can reach the colony of Pindar he runs across two aliens. (Michael Marchioni chose to illustrate the cacti above.) The first is mostly harmless as it is brittle and will break easily:
Cactus Creatures of Pluto
Spiny cacti form crystals, shimmering with an inner luminescence of their own, were all about him, breast-high, covering the floor of the crevasse like a thicket of grotesque jewels. They broke with brittle, tinkling sounds as he forced his way through their ranks. Long, slender, furry parts of them groped through the gloom, and touched him in a way that was half hungry, half inquisitive. They were neither plant nor animal nor the inanimate creation of a purely physical process. They lived, and in a dim way they were intelligent! Yet they were not composed of protoplasm, but of ice, and of liquefied and frozen gases which on Earth would have been a permanent part of the atmosphere. Their vital processes were electrical. That much Terry Sommers remembered from the few sketchy accounts he had read of conditions on Pluto, a world which he had never before visited.
The second alien is the one that gives the story its title. The blue haze is a cloud-shaped organism known as Addison’s Fire that eats its way corrosively into its victim like a similar creature on Tethys:
The Haze Creature
…Those blobs of blue haze, shimmering and shifting near the horizon, inspired fear in him even more than the jagged monsters that crowded around him opposing his passage. Something he remembered was responsible. On Tethys, third satellite of Saturn, there was a haze like that. It was gaseous, corrosive, alive; it ate through metal and glass and flesh, like an acid. This world was a worse hell even than Tethys. Might not there be a still more dreadful haze here, then? The idea made Terry’s pulses quicken with the dread of the unknown.
The injured Venusian strapped to Terry’s back knows the creature’s habits better than he does, giving off a high-pitched scream. This causes the monster to strike but it does two things as it attacks, first, it creates heat, which warms up the captives, and secondly, lights it up. A passing patrol ship sees them and saves them before the corrosive acid can kill them.
“A Beast of the Void” (Astounding Stories, September 1936)
Meteorite Creature
“A Beast of the Void” begins on Earth where the journal of a scientist, Lothar Weiss, reveals how the beast was discovered, believed to be a meteorite.
When I removed it from the cavity in the meteorite, it was round like a ball; but when I poked and pried at it with a small file, it unfolded like the bud of a great, purple flower, and became a thin disk about a foot and a half across. At its center, in what seems its ventral surface, is a fleshy lump, with a mouthlike orifice in it. From the lump, fleshy ridges radiate like the spokes of a wheel, terminating in long, sharp claws at the edge of the disk. The creature looks oddly like the top of a small umbrella.
To this minute it has betrayed not the slightest hint of life; it seems totally incapable of doing me bodily harm, and yet, when I look into the box in which I have placed it and see the black veins in its membranous, semitransparent body, I cannot help but feel uneasy.
Light is reflected from its skin like the opalescent sheen on the scales of a black serpent. And it has what appear to be eyes, scattered, like minute, glassy lenses, over its flesh. There is no plan in their arrangement; they seem to be located entirely at random.
The beast usually lives in space so it is not affected by deep cold or high heat. It is intelligent and can fly through the air and into space by some mysterious means. It takes Weiss into the heavens to experience alien life all over the galaxy but at a cost. The creature, which he names “Darkness”, is radioactive. Even with a lead-lined spacesuit, the radiation will eventually kill him. The inclusion of a teen-age character was to appeal to editor, Mort Weisinger, who made TWS a more kid-friendly Pulp.
“Red Shards of Ceres” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1937)
This story starts with a scientific expedition to Ceres to look for valuable minerals. The ships captain’s little brother, Ronny, stows away, adding a member to the crew. While on a rock-gathering outing, Ronny finds some glowing red shards. Once he touches one, he loses all control of his body. His hijacked body brings more shards for the rest of the astronauts. Once everyone is under the control of the shards, the Earth men go through an airlock, which conceals a vast underground city belonging to the Cereans:
The Cereans
And now the men saw what manner of creatures inhabited this artificial world. From out of the shadows of spidery, grotesque trees, loaded with green fruit, came a group of furry, spheroidal monsters with thick legs and delicate, tentacular arms. Their mouths were toothless orifices in their globular bodies. Their eyes, set close to their mouths, were cruel and keen. That intelligence looked out through those orbs could not be questioned.
Each creature wore a harness decorated with fragments of the red substance which had been the undoing of the Earthmen, and odd, pistol-like weapons dangled in holsters fastened to those harnesses.
These squat creatures worship another, the thing in the pit.
The Pit Monster
Slowly, down an open lane, the Terrestrials were forced to approach the thing. Then they saw what it was—some hellish form of life. It grew in a bowl-like hollow in the floor. It seemed at first glance to be only a semi-liquid mass of phosphorescent pulp. But then one saw the countless fine, nervelike filaments that traversed it in every direction, and the glowing nuclei of the myriad, oversized cells that composed it. The effect of a close scrutiny was disturbing. Presently and inevitably one realized that here in this mass of alien protoplasm resided deificm wisdom, and an intellect that never wearied.
The ghoulish pulp heaved and moved suggestively, thrusting up hungry pseudopods. From the latter, translucent, reddish flakes broke away and dropped to the floor around the pit. These were the Red Shards. They were a natural product of the devilish thing, perhaps originally exuded as a liquid, from its substance, just as a mollusc exudes the liquid which hardens to form its shell.
The Cerens gather the red shards that fall out of the pit. Ronny has his shard knocked out of his hand, allowing him to kill the pit monster. he does this by throwing a heavy spacesuit at it. The delicate controller dies, freeing the Cereans. They have been mind-controlled so long they simply lie down and wait to starve to death.
“Strange Creature” (Science Fiction, August 1939)
A group of greenhorns sign on with a crusty miner only to have him hijack the entire operation. Unfortunately, Marlin is dead, killed by Sabakko, the Jovian local, and now no one can re-start the engines. To survive, Mel Hawks decides to go to distant Sabra, a city, for help. To do this, he needs Sabakko to go with him. The big challenge is to avoid the Jupiterian dangers and keep the primitive Jovian focused on the mission. (A travel plot similar to “Blue Haze on Pluto”.)
Jovian
Sabakko was in a jam. It was usual for Sabakko to be in a jam; and so he wagged his long, shaggy ears in a gesture of apology, just as he had done so often before. His vast shoulders hunched submissively as he licked the blood from his pendulous lips; the gaze of his wicked, horn-lidded eyes wandered with mild concern from the mangled huddle of human flesh on the floor to the white visages of his terrestial companions…Sabakko watched the threatening tableau before him in bewilderment, his gigantic muscles, developed far beyond anything terrestrial, by a lifelong struggle with the ponderous gravity of Jupiter, relaxed. He made a little whimpering gurgle, deep in his throat. Considering his massive size, it seemed ridiculous—as ridiculous, almost, as if a volcano of the Dark Lands had made the chirping of a young bird. It was not a whimper of fear; rather, it was like the puzzled protest of a big, well-meaning dog that, knowing that it has displeased its master, is still not sure of the reason why.
Being a native of the largest planet in the Solar System, Sabakko was at a loss to know how it was that these Earthians could be so fearful of the colossal natural demonstrations of Jupiter; her terrible hot winds, her crushing gravity, two and a half times as great as that of Earth; her vast lava seas, her gigantic storms; and the horrid monstrosities that grew on those steaming plains where the crust of the planet had hardened sufficiently to support life. All these things spelt but one result to human beings who were unprotected by the safeguards of their science. That result was death. Even the dense atmosphere, impregnated with volcanic vapors, was poison to them. But to Sabakko these were only the details of the environment which he had always known; and so, since he was only a simple savage, his puzzlement was understandable.
Tentacle Monster
One of the dangers of Jupiter is a traditional man-eating plant, which Sabbako dispatches:
…The wind was not so strong here in the gorge, but out of the dim murk around him, long, spiny tendrils belonging to forms of life that were neither animal nor quite plant, groped toward him hungrily.
Once a tentacle encircled his body, and his adventure would have reached an abortive end then and there, had it not been for Sabakko, who leaped into action with cold fury, tearing the rooted devil apart with horny fingers.
In the end, Hawks uses a photograph of Sabakko’s love as a reminder of what waits at Sabra. What could have been a story of mutual respect ends up being just another puzzle story with another racist version of alien as colonized. Not one of Gallun’s better efforts. Stories like “Return of a Legend” (Planet Stories, March 1952) does a better job.
“Invaders of the Forbidden Moon” (Planet Stories, Summer 1941)
The moon Io is a forbidden fortress as all Earth ships that try to land there are destroyed in its impenetrable energy shield. Harwich the space pilot falls in with the Arnold family, scientists who have penetrated that energy shield. The two men are betrayed by the fat printer, George Bayley, and find their penetrator drive sabotaged. They crash land on Io and experience the remains of the old Ionian civilization and technology. This includes several types of super-developed robots. They also stumble upon the remains of the original Iononians.
Master Robots
…A bulk was creeping through the opening. It was a machine, so marvelous, so refined in its functioning, that it seemed far more than alive. It was flat, like a small tractor; but there were no treads for it to move on. It seemed, rather, to glide on a cushioning, grayish mist. The thing purred softly, like a great cat, and tiny lights twinkled in crystalline parts of it— batteries to deliver fearful atomic or cosmic power, perhaps. The mechanism had many flexible tentacular arms of metal that glinted with a lavendar luster.
But even the substance of those arms, the metal itself, looked indefinite and eye-hurting at the edges, as though it was partly fourth dimensional, or something.
Both men grasped the truth. Here was that million-year advancement of science that they’d talked about with such thrilled fascination, in the stuffy bar of the Spacemen’s Haven, back in Ganymede City. But Ganymede City, with all its human crudeness and inefficiency, seemed like a lost, happy legend, now, to Arnold and Harwich. Far, far away, and dim. For here was dread wonder to eclipse it. Futurian fact! Physical principles of such a miraculous order that mankind had scarcely dreamed of their outer fringes yet, were functioning here.
Devolved Ionians
In a cage in their prison, Harwich and Arnold find some worm-like creatures with human faces. While the super-tech of the Ionians allowed them to do no work, they slowly devolved into:
And there were creatures, too. Scores of them in each cage. Strange, fragile, sluglike animals crept about aimlessly. They looked just faintly human, with their pinkish skins and manlike heads. But there was no slight shadow of intelligence in those great, sad, stupid eyes.
Even though much of this story reads like trashy space opera, Raymond Z. Gallun still manages to deliver a great concept. One similar to the film Wall-E (2008), sixty-seven years later.
Conclusion
I can’t say that Gallun didn’t do the lowest common denominator of the human looking Venusians who are green variety. Sabakko is pretty much this. He didn’t do it very often, and when he did, he tried to make them interesting in some way. Sabakko is larger than an Earthman but Gallun also tries to show the shape of his mind, which is also not Terran. The majority of his fiction demonstrates real thinking about his alien characters, whether they be ships like in “Derelict” or underwater dwellers in “Davy Jones’ Ambassador”. His portrayal of the Martian Number 774 is classic from a time when most Martians were cannon fodder. (The story got two sequels!) A few earlier critters of Gallun’s can be found here and here.
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