Frank Belknap Long's Solar System - Dark Worlds Quarterly

Yesterday was the 95th anniversary of the first Buck Rogers comic strip ever published in the newspapers. In honor of that Space Opera milestone, here is another Space Opera superstar you might not know so well…

Like many, you may not know that Frank Belknap Long wrote Space Opera. His John Carstairs stories are well remembered and could be included here (but aren’t). I discovered the fact when I got a copy of Night Fear (1979), which was sold as a kind of Mythos/Horror book but was actually mostly SF stories with five of them Space Opera. And this is typical of FBL’s legacy. He is remembered as a pal of Lovecraft and mostly for the stories he wrote between 1924 and 1934. But Frank wrote until the 1980s! There is so many more facets to his work, including comic books, editing and Space Opera!

Long never coordinated his Solar System like Leigh Brackett or Arthur K. Barnes. You don’t get the feeling that the Mars of one story is necessarily the same Mars in another. In this respect, he is closer to Ray Bradbury. This is partly because when FBL wrote a story he wrote it about people. (Which reminds me of John Wyndham,when asked if he could write stories about airplanes, said: No, you can only write stories about people.) Long is such a writer, making his planetary tales stories about how space affects individuals. He wasn’t of the bang-bang shot an alien type space opera writer. A fact that struck me is that FBL has a man and wife (sometimes with children) in most of these stories. Rather than crews filled with alpha males, he explores the dynamic of space families. He was a much better writer, which makes the fact that he is forgotten even sadder.

I lay the blame partly on the fact that he didn’t have a huge SF collection from these stories. There are over forty here, some even written for the prestigious John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction. But no matter. Frank did do one collection, The Rim of the Unknown (1972) for Arkham House. But there in lies the problem. Arkham House and August Derleth, despite several collections of SF tales, are usually associated with H. P. Lovecraft. If Frank had sold this collection to Doubleday or even ACE Books, it might have meant something. Like Night Fear, Rim of the Unknown is a mixed bag.

Well, let’s clear it up here then. Space Opera by Frank Belknap Long in the Pulps between 1934 and 1954. Twenty years, much longer than his early Weird Tales/Horror days. (Frank would not have worried about such hair-splitting. Most of his Horror stuff has plenty of Science Fictional elements in it. Chaugnar Faugn and the Hounds of Tindalos were more Math and less Gothic than many Mythos beasties.) I have arranged the stories by location in Frank Belknap Long’s Solar System, rather than publication date.

Mercury

“The Lost Planet” (Astounding Stories, November 1934)

“The Mercurian” (Planet Stories, Winter 1941-42)

Venus

“Cones” (Astounding Stories, February 1936)

“The Purple Dusk” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945) as Leslie Northern

“The Shadow Dwellers” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945)

“Shadow Over Venus” (Startling Stories, March 1946)

Earth

“The Blue Earthman” (Astounding Stories, April 1935)

“Sky Trap” (Comet Stories, July 1941)

“Atomic Station” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1946)

Moon

“Time Trap” (Planet Stories, Winter 1948)

“Night-Fear” (Dynamic Science Fiction, October 1954)

Eros

“The Lichen From Eros” (Astounding Stories, November 1935)

Mars

“The Black Vortex” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1937)

“Brown” (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1941)

“Long, Long Ago” (Captain Future, Fall 1941)

“The Stellar Vampires” (Science Fiction, July 1943)

“Dark Command” (Startling Stories, Winter 1945)

“The Miniature Menace” (Future Combined with Science Fiction, May-June 1950)

“Martian Homecoming” (Future Combined with Science Fiction, March 1951)

“Lake of Fire” (Planet Stories, May 1951)

“And Someday to Mars” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1952)

“Manhunt” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spring 1954)

The Asteroids

“Prisoners in Flatland” (Startling Stories, September 1941)

“Castaways in Two Dimensions” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1945)

Jupiter

“Red Storm on Jupiter” (Astounding Stories, May 1936)

“The Vibration Wasps” (Comet Stories, January 1941)

“Skyrover” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1945) as Leslie Northern

Io

“Son of His Father” (Startling Stories, June 1943)

Callisto

“Spawn of the Further Dark” (Startling Stories, Spring 1944)

“Beyond the Vortex” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fall 1944)

Saturn

“Invaders From the Outer Suns” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1937)

Uranus

“Red Moon” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1940)

Neptune

“Spawn of the Red Giants” (Astounding Stories, May 1937)

“Two Against Neptune” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1941)

“Circle of Youth” (Super Science Stories, February 1943)

Pluto

“Dweller in the Outer Dark” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1939)

“And We Sailed the Mighty Dark” (Startling Stories, March 1948)

Beyond

Conclusion

“Mission to a Distant Star” (Satellite Science Fiction, February 1958)

Frank Belknap Long’s Solar System did not stop with the Pulps. His Space Opera found a place in the paperback books of the 1950s and 1960s. Space Station 1 (1957), Mars is My Destination (1962), Three Steps Spaceward (1963), It Was the Day of the Robot (1963) and Mission to a Star (1964) all continue the themes and traditions of FBL’s Space Opera Pulps. The 1970s would pull Frank back into Horror writing as well as Gothic Romance (as Lyda Belknap Long), a type of women’s fiction Frank was certainly able to write with all the shipboard romance found in these space tales. But he would revisit the old Space Opera fun in the 1980s with “The Soaring” (Astro-Adventures: Tales of Scientifiction, January 1987) and “Sauce For the Gander” (Astro-Adventures: Tales of Scientifiction, January 1988). FBL loved writing of the Spaceways just as much as he did of Lovecraftian monsters.