I recently heard that ASB is a neologism used by writers of Alternate History Science Fiction. The term refers to an implausible idea based on current knowledge, a really stupid turn of events that makes the reader stop and say, “What?” ASB stands for “Alien Space Bats” and was coined by Alison Brooks in 1999. Brooks used it to point out that World War II’s Operation Sea Lion could only have succeeded if the Nazis had had the help of Alien Space Bats. Since then the term has been used to signify any highly unlikely event.
When I came across this I stopped and tried to recall if there were any classic SF stories about ASBs? To which stories was Brooks referring, if any. Because a couple of my favorite old SF tales do in fact contain extraterrestrial bat-like creatures. I recalled SF and Fantasy stories about bat creatures were begun in 1894 by H. G. Wells with “In the Avu Observatory” (Pall Mall Budget, August 09, 1894) but that creature was an unknown South American variety of giant bat trapped in an astronomical observatory, not a creature of space. So where did the space bats come in?
I started to dig and came across Gustave la Rouge’s The Prisoners of Mars (1908) and its sequel, The War of the Vampires (1909). The plot has a scientist named Robert Darvel voyage to Mars using semi-occult methods where he encounters a race of vampire bat Martians ruled by a great brain. By the end of the book, Darvel is returned to Earth but the ASBs follow him back and a war must be fought for both planets. Since this series was available only in French until 2008, I don’t know how much influence it had outside of France. Still, it is filled with adventure and horror in a good mix and stands as our first ASB classic.
In the American pulps, “Across Space” (Weird Tales, September October November 1926) by Edmond Hamilton may be the first. This story was his second ever written and a three part serial. It set a pattern for many monster invasion stories that followed but only this story features ASBs.
The world is threatened when it is observed that Mars is no longer orbiting the sun but on a collision course with Earth. The narrator, a junior Professor named Allan, looks to his mentor, Dr. Jerome Whitley for answers as the cities of the world fall apart in madness. The men head for Easter Island because of clues that point in that direction. A mysterious light was observed shooting from the island, twice all the compasses of earth pointed at the island for a short time, plus the scientists’ friend, Dr. John Holland also disappeared there. They know it is a desperate hope that the answer lies there but they take.
They fly to Easter Island in a Navy plane, piloted by a Lt. Rider. They see one of the Easter Island statues with its long face and strange rope-like ears. The village there is deserted, finding only patches of white powder. Allan and Whitley experience a deafening noise followed by a brilliant light. These are directed straight at approaching Mars. They return the next night to see who is sending the weird messages. As they watch from the top of the volcano crater, they are attacked by two flying creatures:
But that question I never uttered, for as whirled around to Dr. Whitley, my eyes met a sight that froze the words on my lips, in sheer surprise and terror. Winging out of the air behind my unsuspecting companion was a great white thing with flapping wings, that seemed for a moment to be a giant white bat with a human face. In one horror-stricken glance I saw the shadowy white wings, the thin, spindling body, with taloned hands that were grasping for Whitley’s throat from behind,then the face held my gaze like a dreadful magnet, a face that was high and cruel and thin-featured, with deep-set, darkly-lustrous eyes, a face of a deathly white, a repulsive white, the white of a snake’s belly! And the ears were long and ropelike!
So ends the first part of the story, with Allan falling down the crater and into unconsciousness.
The second portion has the two men meet the telepathically-controlled android slaves of the bat-people and see the vast underground city beneath the volcano. They are taken to a cell and locked up. In the cell is Holland, who gives the history of the bat-people and their reason for pulling mars toward Earth. The ASBs came from Mars, rebel scientists who fled a dying world. Their numbers have been dwindling and this made it hard to take over the world since humans have risen from apehood to mastery of the planet. To take back the planet they invented a wand that disintegrates people into white powder. They also built the giant attractor/repulsor in the bottom of the crater. With this they are pulling Mars to Earth so the hordes of Mars can join their fellows and destroy all humanity. The repulsor beam will then send Mars back into space.
Part three has the men execute their desperate plan. First, they begin at eleven pm, knowing all the ASBs will be in their temple doing their nightly ritual. Second, they have to free themselves by combining their weak telepathic ability to get their androids to open the door. They accomplish this and make it back to the pneumatic tube, where they find robes that repel all rays. Unfortunately they let their telepathic control slip and the two androids attack. In a short battle, the men stab the androids to death but Holland dies as well.
Allan and Whitley continue to the control box where the switches for the rays are managed. They kill the two ASBs assigned to the switch box. Their robes protect them from their ray weapons. Whitley knows that at the last bell they must throw the switch for the green ray to send Mars away from earth. He gives Allan a note and sends him back to the plane, to drop bombs on the volcano. As Allan crawls out of the crater he sees the ray switch from red to green, then a terrible explosion when both rays are turned on. Holland had explained that this must never be done. The volcano and all the ASBs are destroyed. Allan reads the note. Whitley knew it was a suicide mission. He receives a statue on the Golden Gate Bridge as a savior of humanity.
The finale is good action-adventure stuff, reminding me a little of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Out of Time’s Abyss (1916) featuring the winged Wieroos, products of evolution, not alien bats at all. Hamilton would have read the story ten years before writing “Across Space”. The plot of “Across Space” would be recycled dozens of times in later issues of Weird Tales.
“The Bat-Men of Mars” by Wood Jackson (Air Wonder Stories, May 1930, Wonder Stories June July 1930) gives us the planet Mars inhabited by humans but also a vicious race of bat-men. For more on this story, go here.
Neil R. Jones includes some very unusual space bats in a short scene in “The Asteroid of Death” (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Fall 1931). Inside the titular asteroid, Reene goes down a tunnel to the center of the rock where he is attacked by bat creatures. He escapes, they are not able to follow him out into the void of space. This scene serves the purpose of getting the narrator away from the ship when it is destroyed. He doesn’t dwell on the bats much. Like asking, how do they survive in an enclosed ecosystem inside a rock?
My favorite ASB story is called “Exiles on Asperus” by John Wyndham (under his original name, John Beynon Harris.) It appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s final Wonder Stories Quarterly (March 1933). The story begins with a Martian revolt that has the Earthmen who run the prison ship Argenta stranded on Asperus. The plucky engineer, Angus McDowell, puts one over on the Martians, emptying their fuel tanks and stranding them as well. Angus and his shipmates know that a previous ship, Red Glory, was lost on Asperus twenty-five years earlier, and Angus notices what looks like wreckage as they land. They head for the location of crash site with the angry Martians close behind. That night the crew takes refuge in a cave. Out of the darkness they are attacked by bat-like creatures. Some of the invaders are killed but members of the crew are also been taken prisoner.
The next day the Earthmen find the survivors of Red Glory, living an agrarian existence beside the wreckage. The old ship is broken but has plenty of fuel. At night the farmers lock the evil night creatures out by sealing the ship. Angus is interested to find out all he can about the bat creatures. Old Jamie, who leads the village, tells them they are called Batrachs, and that they have a city in the caves. All who are captured by the Batrachs never return. Despite this Angus and his crew will go to the Batrach city and rescue those taken. Three bedraggled Martians show up and want to join the Earthmen. The Batrachs have decimated their ranks, even taking their leader Sen-Su.
Wyndham changes viewpoint characters at this point and goes to two men captures by the bats, Dr. Cleary and Crewman David. We get a small tour of the underground realm, with its somber Red Glory captives, who live a drab life, seemingly without children. When David asks about them he gets shunned. Later he meets another underground dweller, a tall, pale youth who acts as interpreter. He seems to be repulsed by the outsiders. He leads the two men through theBatrach caverns until he tricks them into a cell.
Returning to Angus and his men, we get some good fight scenes as the humans encounter and are repelled by the Batrachs. Armed with guns and long blades they do well at first, but don’t know the lay of the land. The Batrachs are willing to sacrifice themselves and eventually they begin to win. It is only the sudden appearance Of Sen-Su armed with a solid steel bar that turns the tide. In the end, the men agree to a truce so they can speak with the Batrach council. That meeting ends with Angus demanding that all the humans be released. The Batrachs agree to free those who wish to go.
This includes only the sad survivors Cleary and David found. The children, known as the New Generation (no Pepsi on Asperus, sorry), refuse to go. The Batrachs show Angus and Dr. Cleary and several others why. The human children are taken at birth and raised in nurseries by Batrachs. They are conditioned to hate the Outside and the Batrachs comfort them when this conditioning scares them. The humans are used to do all the manual manipulation the Bats can’t with their claws. To cement the relationship, the New Generation practice a form of religion that worships the bats and promises that one day all humans will grow wings and become bats. Angus knows when he’s licked and plans to use the fuel from the Red Glory to get back to Earth. He also plans to join forces with the Martians and heal the wounds between humans. Together they can wipe out the Batrachs.
Two things strike me about this tale, first, how damn good it is. It begins with all the usual adventure trappings of poorer grade Space Opera: the stalwart humans, the insidious Martians, stranded on a planet filled with terrible creatures. This could have been just another ho-hum space tale but Wyndham takes a left turn and creates the fascinating Batrachs. He could have dwelt on their scary bat-like appearance and gone down a horror tale route but other than the first scene in the cave he doesn’t dwell on it much.
Instead he builds a logical society where intelligent but not dexterous rulers use humans, who are so good at adapting, to fulfill their needs. As Angus points out, our best survival instinct is used against us to the Batrachs’ benefit. Unlike so many human slave stories in Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, Wyndham’s relationship between the humans and their masters is brilliantly realized. The Batrachs raise the young and never need to imprison the humans at all. It is a cage of the mind, rather than the body. The author is in a definitely Wellsian mode here, with a religion as repulsive and controlling as the one practiced by the Beast Men on Moreau’s island. Wyndham would make further attacks at societal control in later works.
The other thing that struck me was the name “Batrach”. It does contain “bat” at the front and looks like a creepy version of “Bat”. The adjective “Batrachian” from which it seems to borrow has nothing to do with bats. It actually means “frog-like”. Wyndham, if he had been worried about such thing, should have called them “Chiropterans”.
“After World’s End” (Marvel Science Stories, February 1939) by Jack Williamson features the Sandbat. About the story he wrote in Wonder’s Child; My Life in Science Fiction (revised edition, 2005):
“After World’s End” was a longer novelette, and one I always liked for its mood and color, though it lacks any new plot idea. I was happy with the sandbat, the alien creature in it, but [John W.] Campbell and [Farnsworth] Wright weren’t entirely taken. Erisman bought it at half a cent a word and ran it on Marvel Science with a rather lurid Wesso cover (above).
In the story, the sandbar is encountered in an interstellar show:
In their years of stellar roving, however, the four had collected a good many genuine oddities. Setsi, the “sandbat,” was one of these—and
perhaps the most remarkable being I had ever seen. Her bodily chemistry was in fact based upon silicon instead of carbon; she really
ate quartz.
In shape, she was something like a six-pointed starfish, some eight or nine inches across. Her flat body had a gorgeous crystalline glitter of a thousand yellows, purples, reds, and greens. In the center, where the six slender arms joined, was a single huge eye, dark and sorrowful.
Being silicon-based lifeforms, the sandbats are virtually immortal but also don’t reproduce. There were only three of them. Two were killed in an argument, leaving Setsi alone amongst her kind. (Her solitary existence is the most Merritt-esque part of this tale.) She is also telepathic, making her good at finding out secrets.
“The Space Bat” (Planet Stories, Winter 1946) by Carl Selwyn reads like a Northern transplanted to the asteroid belt. An evil fur combine is buying up the small planetoids that hunter, Lou Flint, has inherited from his father. The fur traders want to slaughter the feather deer, beautiful creatures with no one to take care of them. Flint comes up with a desperate plan to kidnap the head of the fur combine. His sidekick is a Venusian, green-skinned and named Greeno though he talks like a movie serial Indian. (I though perhaps Selwyn had paid his bills writing Westerns but his only stories appear in Planet Stories.) To Flint’s surprise, the head of the fur business is woman, Miss Karen Vaun.
The kidnapping scheme is dumped when Flint’s ship is attacked by a gigantic space bat. During the chase between the ship and bat, Miss Vaun proves a brave accomplice, manning the fuel pump while her lawyer and fur expert cower. The price of a captured bat would buy all the planetoids Flint wants to protect, so he plans to pursue it once he switches ships with Greeno. Unfortunately, the Venusian messes up and Flint is held captive as a kidnapper. Over the radio were hear the space bat attack Miss Vaun and Greeno!
After escaping torture by air lock, Flint steals the Patrol’s ship and takes on the bat that is trying to eat Karen Vaun and Greeno. Only after a prolonged battle, in which forests are flattened, does Flint succeed. When the cops come to arrest him as a kidnapper, Karen Vaun saves him, the couple now fast in love.
Selwyn’s tale has every kind of cliche the space opera genre (as well as Noir and Westerns) can throw at it, but the space bat is pretty impressive, four times the size of an elephant and relentless:
“What had been a small clearing in the brush, not even large enough to land on, was an area big as a football field. And in the center of it lay the bat. The thing lay there like a blotch of spilled ink, grotesque and horrible. It was using horny claws on the tips of its wings to slam Greeno’s space-ship house back and forth like a nut…
Novels after the pulp era did not completely ignore the ASB. Eleven years later with the novel, The Solarians (1966) by respected SF writer, Norman Spinrad appeared in paperback. Spinrad creates the Duglaari or “Doogs”. A technologically equal space-faring race, the Doogs challenge the colonists’ supremacy in the galaxy.
When it appears the Doog space fleet will win, the humans call upon the Solarians, technologically advanced men who dwell in a secret conclave. The plot follows how the Solarians met, out-manuever and finally destroy the Doogs, at the cost of the planet Earth, but the future of the colonies.
The Duglaari are worthy ASBs:
“The Doog, at first glance, seemed to be all limbs and neck. He was an upright biped, with two arms, two legs, no tail and one head. That seemed to be the extent of his resemblance to a human being.
The legs were long and powerful, and covered, like the rest of the body, with a fine brown fur. They sprouted from a small, spherical body about the size and shape of a large, hairy beachball. Two long, muscular arms grew abruptly from the equator of the spherical body, ending in large, six-digited hands, with two opposable thumbs.
A long, apparently flexible neck supported a large triangular head, which sported two enormous, bat-like ears. The face, the only part of the creature not covered by the fine brown fur, consisted of two large red eyes with black irises on either side of one huge nostril set flush with the leathery brown skin, and a disconcertingly human mouth. The Doog stood roughly the height of a man, and was dressed in short black boots, and a plain, armless and legless dun-colored smock.” (The Solarians by Norman Spinrad)
The last ASB novel to be mentioned is a post-Brooks piece called Learning the World (2005) by the Scottish writer, Ken Macleod. Since it appeared after Brooks’ phrase, it can’t have had any influence. Macleod intentionally chooses ASBs as an kind of in-joke to fellow SF fans.
“I drift the POV to above the sidewalk and bob along at the local walking pace. I’m two or three heads taller than most of the bat people. Seen close-up, their faces are like a somewhat flattened face of a fox. They have more in the way of jaw and snout than most humans, balanced by much larger eyes. The fine fur on their faces is patterned with stripes and spots, and their fur colours vary – grey, white, black, brown, reddish and so on. Some of these colours and patterns may be from artificial dyes. Their eye colour, oddly to our eyes, varies little. It’s a clear yellow, one of their many features – like walking along eating chunks of raw meat, or scratching each other’s fur, or chittering their teeth – that strikes us as animal-like. Their speech comes across as a continuous trill of chirps and squeals, with some low growling notes.” (Learning the World by Ken MacLeod)
Other genres have used the bat monster idea since Hamilton and Wyndham. Lin Carter, writing Conan pastiches, used bat creatures on several occasions in unfinished Robert E. Howard collaboration, “The Hand of Nergal” (1967) and in “The Gem in the Tower” (1978) a Conan rewrite of a Thongor story, “Black Moonlight” (1976). Basil Copper in his Lovecraftian horror novel, The Great White Space (1980), had extra-dimensional bat monsters. Even the comics used the idea by reversing the syllables in Batman. Man-Bat premiered in Detective Comics #400 (June 1970) before a short-lived series in 1975. All of these characters share the Fantasist’s fascination with bats and their odd mammalian flight, but none are space aliens per se. Only these six stories actually fulfill Alison Brook’s title of ASB.
