This post is brought to you by Monster, Monster 2 and Monster 3 by G. W. Thomas. These collections are filled with posts from Dark Worlds Quarterly. In fact, they are the only way to read some of the early pieces written by GWT. Volume 1 looks at subjects from Slime Monsters, Alien Space Bats, Vampires in old creepy castles, out in space and even in fantasy fiction. Volume 2 has posts about writers like S. P. Meek and Francis Flagg as well as L. Sprague de Camp’s Pusadian fantasy and the Cthulhu Mythos. Each book is a semi-connected weave of Pulp and even older SF/F/H.
In April 1951, movie goers were thrilled to see John W. Campbell’s Science Fiction story “Who Goes There?” (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1938) turned into a monster-fest of classic proportions. The Thing From Another Planet had James Arness running around the Antarctica with spikes on his hands. Twenty-eight years later, it is the crew of the Nostromo who must survive a haunted house in space in Alien (1979). And what about all those B-Movies in between with invasions of giant ants, spiders, praying mantis, etc. All scientifically explained but with the only intent of scaring the pants off you. Where Hollywood goes, the fictioneers have already been. Hollywood got it from the Pulps. The Pulps borrowed it from H. G. Wells.
In the 1930s, genres were forming, and editors had a lot to do with how they eventually came to be seen. No one would deny that John W. Campbell took Science Fiction by the horns in 1938 and directed it towards “The Literature of Ideas” that embraces the Golden Age writers such as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Other editors had similar moments of greatness, including Harry Bates creating unabashed adventure SF in 1930, or Ray Palmer chasing UFOs in the 1950s. Before all of these there had been Hugo Gernsback publishing the first all-Science Fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in April 1926. He would do it again in 1929, when he created the first competitors to his own magazine, with Air Wonder and Science Wonder Stories.
Hugo Gernsback is a tarnished hero. He is acknowledged as the father of SF publishing with the Hugo Award being named after him, but he has warts. H. P. Lovecraft and his circle of friends named him “Hugo the Rat”, because of his business practices. These included paying infrequently and very little for stories. This is unfortunate for several reasons. The first is that if Lovecraft had found Gernsback a lucrative market, he might have written more Science Fiction. Secondly, and here is my main point, the Wellsian mode of Science Fiction might have expanded and become a more powerful sub-genre of SF.
I suppose I should define what I mean by “Wellsian Science Fiction”. (I once gave the sub-genre the sobriquet Sci-Hor but that didn’t take. I wonder why? Sian MacArthur labels it “Gothic Science Fiction”, much better! Let’s use that!) Our idea of what SF is is largely defined by the last eighty years of the genre, with some thinking it is about robots or space wars or time travel. It is all of these things but the purpose to which it serves has changed over time. H. G. Wells in 1898 thought in terms of political comment. John W. Campbell in 1940 thought in terms of extrapolation from good science. The New Wave of the 1960s worked in a mode of literary expression. Comic books and adventure pulps just wanted to tell cracking good stories in exotic locations. All of these are SF, but in the 1930s these various modes were all beginning to form. Along with another, the Science Fiction tale that intends to frighten or examine the “horror” of the universe. I call this Wellsian Science Fiction, with the best examples being written by H. P. Lovecraft in “The Colour Out of Space” (Amazing Stories, September 1927), and “At the Mountains of Madness” (Astounding Stories, February March April 1936) and “The Shadow Out of Time” (Astounding Stories, June 1936), both published by F. Orlin Tremaine. Other examples include “The Whisperer in Darkness” (Weird Tales, August 1931) and “In the Walls of Eryx (Weird Tales, October 1939) with Kenneth Sterling.
Lovecraft’s fiction works upon the idea famously expressed in his “The Supernatural Horror in Literature: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown…” And what is more unknown than outer space? Or the bottom of the sea? Or inside the molecule? Lovecraft certainly didn’t invent SF stories that frighten. That credit falls to Our Lady of Darkness, Mary Shelley (1797-1851). The eighteen year-old wife of Percy Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1816 as part of a ghost story contest between her, her husband, Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori. The novel was published in 1818, and in the opinion of Brian W. Aldiss, was the first SF novel. What she actually did was write a Gothic Explique (or Explained Gothique) but put the explanation at the beginning. Her intentions were those of most Gothic storytellers but her method became that of the Science Fiction writers.
After Shelley, it was H. G. Wells who expanded and formed the SF tale with Horror, creating the archetypes that exist in many forms today. The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898) all feature a good dollop of terror. These novels all begin with “What if…” but manage to terrorize as well as they explore those possibilities. Wellsian “What Ifs” can go either way, especially in his short fiction where he examines the effects of strange creatures like intelligent ants, giant rats and blood-sucking plants.
When Hugo Gernsback chose H. G. Wells as one of the models upon which to write stories for his new magazines (along with Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe) he frequently used reprints of Horror-tinged tales like “The Empire of the Ants”, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid”. In many of Wells’s tales we get what will eventually turn into the “Monster Story” and all those awful B-Movies.
Let’s take a look at the choices of Horror-dominated tales that appeared in Hugo’s version of Amazing Stories, which ends in 1929 when bankruptcy will steal his magazines. There are many stories that have smaller doses of terror that I have chosen to ignore but the opening scene with a horrible monster or invention is common in many stories that move away from the terror to look at the science instead. A good example of this is “The Talking Brain” (Amazing Stories, August 1926) which features a cover of a scientist looking away in horror (see Topper). The tale should have been a Lovecraftian nightmare but proves to be something much more mundane.
H. G. Wells
Gernsback used other Wells stories I haven’t mentioned because they are not horrific in nature, but I did select these, the majority of his appearances, which all have some elements of horror. Many feature a monster of some kind, a spin-off from the SF-Horror tale that would have its own features later with novels like Jaws (1975), movies like Godzilla (1954), TV shows like The Incredible Hulk (1977-1982) and comic books like Swamp Thing (1973).
Gernsback reprinted the best novels with The Island of Dr, Moreau (Amazing Stories, October–November 1926), The Time Machine (Amazing Stories, May 1927), The War of the Worlds (August–September 1927) and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells (Amazing Stories, June July 1928). You may not think of some of these as Horror novels but the Morlocks attacking in the cave and the end of life on Earth have their chills. The Martians feeding on their human captives is also a great Horror piece. Wells mixes the terror in with the rest.
Wells liked to set his stories in remote places like the jungle. “The Empire of the Ants” (Amazing Stories, August 1926), “Aepyrnos Island” (Amazing Stories, October 1927) , “Pollack and the Porroh Man” (Amazing Stories, February 1928) and “The Moth”(Amazing Stories, August 1928) all take place in swampy, hard-to-reach places or on uncharted islands.
Sometimes the terrors come to sleepy old England like “The Late Mr. Elvesham” (Amazing Stories, June 1927) a tale of body transfer that would inspire Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstop” (Weird Tales, January 1937) and Stephen King’s “Gramma” (Weirdbook, Spring 1984). “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” by H. G. Wells (Amazing Stories, March 1928) is Wells’s blood-sucking plant story for which he often gets too much credit. The idea of the man-eating plant goes back to a hoax piece The Madagascar Tree by Edmund Spenser (October 27, 1874).Wells’s orchid appeared in Pall Mall Budget, August 2, 1894 , twenty years later.
Wells made comment on Spiritualism and ghosts (always with a scientific edge) in “The Plattner Story” (Amazing Stories, July 1927) and “The Stolen Body” (Amazing Stories, January 1928). The last story appeared in Weird Tales, November 1925. For Hugo to use it so soon afterward is surprising. WT gave it the cover but Hugo did not.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was a big influence on Jules Verne, tales like “The Balloon Hoax” or “The Eternal Adam”. Hugo also used two non-Vernian tales, I suspect looking for mad scientist/mesmerist stories. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (Amazing Stories, April 1926) is one of Poe’s most scientific Horror tales. The language that details Valdemar’s strange existence and death is highly technical, not verbosely Gothic. Lovecraft would later model his story “Cool Air” (Tales of Magic and Mystery, March 1928) on this Poe tale. “Mesmeric Revelation” by Edgar Allan Poe (Amazing Stories, May 1926) is a dated hypnosis tale but Gernsback was open to SF that worked on the mind as well as the soul.
Otis Adelbert Kline
“The Malignant Entity” (Amazing Stories, June 1926) and “The Radio Ghost” (Amazing Stories, September 1927) were by Otis Adelbert Kline, a sub-editor at Weird Tales during Edwin Baird’s editorship as well a writer for Argosy with Edgar Rice Burroughs style serials. There is little reason for hm to appear in the low-paying Amazing Stories except Dr. Dorp ran out of weirdness. “The Phantom Wolfhound” appeared in Weird Tales, June 1923. “The Malignant Entity” appeared in Weird Tales, May-June-July 1924 with more SF explanation than the previous tale. With “The Radio Ghost” Kline goes full SF and Farnsworth Wright, the new editor would have passed on the sequel. Gernsback was likely a choice of last resort.
A. Merritt
“The People of the Pit” by A. Merritt (All-Story Weekly, January 5, 1918) was reprinted in Amazing Stories, March 1927 and Amazing Stories Annual, July 1927. Merritt was the perfect choice of Half SF/Half supernatural writer. His stories and novels all have a sense of darkness but can be quite explained as SF. He was also the brightest star of the current Fantasy writers.
“The Moon Pool” by A. Merritt (Amazing Stories, May June July 1927) originally appeared as “The Moon Pool” (All-Story Weekly, June 22, 1918) and “Conquest of the Moon Pool” (All-Story Weekly, February 15- March 22, 1919). Both stories were combined for the novel version. H. P. Lovecraft was a fan, basing his Deep Ones on the fish-frogs in Merritt’s novel.
Merritt did not appear again in the original Amazing Stories. He would get reprinted though, most of his finished works would appear after 1939 in Mary Gnaedinger’s Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Fantastic Novels and even A. Merritt Fantasy Magazine. The re-issuing of Merritt’s stories and novels (usually with illos by Virgil Finlay) was another important stand for Horror-tinged Fantasy and SF. Gnaedinger made Gothic Science Fiction her brand, though I suspect she would have called it simply “Fantasy”. (This was 1939 and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was only two years old, and the term had yet to drive a wedge between Horror and Science Fiction.)
Singles
“The Thing From – Outside” by George Allan England (Amazing Stories, April 1926) was first published in Hugo’s Science and Invention, April 1923, showing that Gernsback did not have a problem with a mostly Horror SF tale. This story of people being hunted by something like the Wendigo in the northern woods has only a small SF rationale to it. It could have sold easily at Weird Tales as a “weirdie”.
“The Green Splotches” by T. S. Stribling (, January 3, 1920) reprinted in Amazing Stories, March 1927 starts as an adventure then becomes a Horror tale to finish as an SF piece. Simply brilliant, Hugo was dumb enough to give away the ending with the cover!
“The Plague of the Living Dead” by A. Hyatt Verrill (Amazing Stories, April 1927) was one of several Verrill tales that could be here, though it is the most obvious. “Through the Crater’s Rim” is another from Amazing Stories, December 1926.
“The Malignant Flower” by Anthos (Amazing Stories, September 1927) is a classic plant monster story. It makes Wells’s flowering orchid look like a weed.
“The Colour Out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft (Amazing Stories, September 1927) was the story that would give us the cliché of the meteorite that cracks open and drools slime all over people (The Blob, Stephen King in Creepshow). HPL’s use of the idea is much scarier. The alien returning to the sky as a pillar of fire inspired a few writers like Ray Bradbury. Nicholas Cage did the movie version a few years ago. You know something unusual is going to happen when you see that extra U.
“The Comet Doom” by Edmond Hamilton (Amazing Stories, January 1928) was an important inspiration for many themes including the killer tin robot (as opposed to the meat-sack Frankenstein monster). Hamilton plays the Horror card in the beginning with the brains of the captives being placed in steel bodies. This tale would inspire H. P. Lovecraft’s brain jars of Yuggoth in “The Whisperer in Darkness”.
“The Ancient Horror” by Hal Grant (Amazing Stories, April 1928) is a pretty standard monster hunt story, with an explorer meeting a dinosaur in the river. It is not particularly new, a variation of several Wellsian pieces but welcome among the duller gadget stories.
“The Octopus Cycle” by Irvin Lester and Fltcher Pratt (Amazing Stories, May 1928) A scientist goes to Madagascar at the request of a colleague. There he finds a race of intelligent and giant mollusks picking off the locals. A giant version of Wells’s killer squid with a little William Hope Hodgson thrown in.
“The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson (Amazing Stories, December 1928) is another surprise. It was Jack Williamson’s first sale and is clearly an SF tale but one in the mode of A. Merritt so it has some of the aura of Horror that author engenders.
“The Worm” by David H. Keller (Amazing Stories, March 1929) is probably my favorite Keller story, with its giant graboid worm. The Doctor (Keller was a psychiatrist) uses the idea for sheer terror. He could write sociological SF but was best at the scary stuff. (His social commentary is marred by horridly dated opinions on race and feminism.)
Conclusion
Hugo Gernsback had an opportunity to win Lovecraft and other Cosmic Horror writers over to his side and publish more Gothic Science Fiction. But he dragged his feet, paying for “The Colour in Space” after so long that Lovecraft refused to send him anymore. Despite HPL’s ban on Gernsback, Lovecraft’s friend and correspondent, Clark Ashton Smith did sell to Wonder Stories in the 1930s, having a slightly different experience. Smith sold sixteen stories between 1930-1933, but it wasn’t pay that was the issue. Gernsback wanted to keep Smith around, so in an unGernsbackian move, he paid him for all the fiction he published. In Smith’s case, it was editorial interference that ended the relationship. Gernsback’s sub-editor, David Lasser, heavily edited “The Dweller in the Gulf” and Smith refused to sell to him anymore.
Other friends of Lovecraft’s who also sold to Gernsback include Richard F. Searight with “The Cosmic Horror” and Kenneth Sterling with “The Brain-Eaters of Pluto”, both in the April 1934 issue of Wonder Stories. This particular issue of Wonder almost feels like a Horror Special. But we’ll get to them in the next post when we look at how the Gothic/Horror elements submerge into Science Fiction and become more integrated.
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