Reading a scanned copy of The Arkham Sampler v#2 #5 (Winter 1949) August Derleth got writers, editors and fans to compile their top twelve books in their SF library. The top list was agreed upon by a strong majority that answered the call. (John W. Campbell and Ray A. Palmer must have been too busy exploring alternative realities.) Those that did include David H. Keller, P. Schuyler Miller, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. Van Vogt, Donald Wandrei, Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), Sam Merwin Jr., Paul L. Payne, Everett Bleiler, A. Langley Searles, Sam Moskowitz and Forrest J. Ackerman.
The list is crammed with H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. Huxley’s Brave New World, Adventures in Time & Space from Healy & McComus, Slan by A. E. van Vogt, The Lost World by Conan Doyle, Gladiator by Philip Wylie, all of these seem like likely choices. A little less familiar are S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below, John Taine’s Before the Dawn, but at least I know of these writers. Derleth’s Strange Ports of Call is also mentioned, which may have been a courtesy to the man doing the survey, though there weren’t many collections out there in 1949.
There are two names and titles I have never heard of: To Walk the Night by William Sloane and Out of the Silence by Erle Cox. Now remember this is the majority of those asked agreeing. Who are these men and why have their “important must-have volumes” disappeared from the public attention?
A quick peak at ISFDB tells me William Sloane was born 1906 and died in 1974. He only wrote two novels, To Walk the Night in 1937 and The Edge of Running Water (1939), and one story in 1954 and that’s it. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia has more: Sloane liked to mix the occult with SF. To Walk the Night is about an alien who possesses the body of a physicist’s wife with the alien killing the scientist and his son. Comparisons to Lovecraft are mentioned. The Edge of Running Water is the tale of a mad scientist trying to resurrect his wife. It was filmed as The Devil Commands (1941), directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Boris Karloff. Sloane was a publisher, and chose to focus on that profession rather than writing.
Erle Cox turns out to be an Aussie newspaperman born in 1873 who died in 1950. Out of the Silence was his first novel in 1925 with Fool’s Harvest (1939) and The Missing Angel (1947). Out of the Silence is set in Australia where a man discovers a giant cylinder under the earth. This treasure proves to be the accumulated knowledge of a past civilization from 27 million years ago. The novel was adapted as a comic in 1934. A story with a similar idea was “Earth’s Lucky Day” by Francis Flagg and Forrest J. Ackerman ( Wonder Stories, March-April 1936). I never knew what may have inspired that later tale.
Why have I never heard of either of these men? I understand that Science Fiction has produced many stories that are not remembered. Many are thankfully forgotten. (Don’t believe me? Read anything by Joseph W. Skidmore.) Did Sloane and Cox deserve to fade from our attention? I want to read these books. So, first I looked in Judith Merrill’s wonderful collection at the University of Toronto. Nope, she mustn’t have been enough of a fan to buy a copy. Internet Archive also produced nada. I guess I will have to look to Amazon…
More digging at ISFDB shows me that To Walk the Night has been reprinted 17 times in English. The Edge of Running Water just as many. Cox’s Out of the Silence thirteen times. Have I been living under a rock? I found a compilation of Sloane’s novels called The Rim of Morning with a Stephen King introduction. (Now I really feel out of the loop.) King suggests why these books may have slid out of the SF field: “They are good stories and can be read simply for pleasure, but what makes them fascinating and takes them to a higher level is their complete (and rather blithe) disregard of genre boundaries.” Science Fiction after 1938 pressed hard to define what was or was not SF. Sloane began as SF but must have been relegated to Horror, a genre many SF fans disregarded.
Can one not blame themselves for their blind spots? I may have seen these paperback editions before but ignored them for more Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft or any other author I collect avidly. You can be sure I will grab one if I come across it now. How many other eclipsed classics am I missing? Once again that old adage proves true: the more I learn the less I know…
Last little bit: I discovered that I did know William Sloane. In 1979 he wrote The Craft of Writing, a book on how to write. I must dipped into this book several times over the years. It seems like every library I visited had a copy. I never bothered to ask: what does William Sloane know about writing? i might have stumbled onto To Walk the Night a little sooner.
