If you missed the last one…
As Robert Louis Stevenson said in “Requiem”… “Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill”. The hunters here are home from a much greater distance than a mere hill. These men and women are back from other planets where they stalked the strange fauna of space. Or time. Sometimes they are the prey instead of the hunter. The earliest tales here are certainly of that ilk, with Lovecraftian beasties hunting down those foolish enough to delve into the Cthulhu mysteries.
“The Hounds of Tindalos” (Weird Tales, March 1929) by Frank Belknap Long was the original Cthulhu Mythos hunters. Chalmers peeks into inter-dimensional worlds only to rouse these savage hunters. He ends up dead, with his head cut off and covered in blue goo. C. C. Senf didn’t really convey that much in the illo.
“The Beetle Experiment” (Amazing Stories, June 1929) by Russell Hays is Science Fiction first Pulp hunter. Asa creates then loses a giant tiger beetle. After eating five people he hunts it down and shoots it with a shotgun. The giant bug story comes from H. G. Wells. Of course!
“The Hunters From Beyond” (Strange Tales, October 1932) by Clark Ashton Smith is another occult version. A sculptor crosses the line between earth and another hell dimension for his art. This costs him his love, Marta. The hunters are elementals that dwell in a dimension lower than ours, ever hunting for prey.
“The Black Destroyer” (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1939) by A. E. van Vogt is a classic SF tale about a cat-like alien that the men from The Beagle must hunt and are hunted by. It was preceded by “The Prowler of the Wastelands” by Harl Vincent, which appeared in Astounding Stories, April 1935. (For more on this story and Van Vogt’s tale, go here.) The cat-like alien was certainly the inspiration for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons‘ Displacer Beast, recently seen in the new movie.
“Discord in Scarlet” (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1939) by A. E. van Vogt is a repeat of the above story. This time the men of The Beagle have to find and destroy an alien that can pass through walls. Von Vogt sued the producers of Alien over the similarities between this story and the film, though the film’s writers deny any connection.
“The Mechanical Mice” (Astounding Science-Fiction, January 1941)by Maurice G. Hugi and Eric Frank Russell has malevolent technology that predates Bradbury or Philip K. Dick. Like “The Beetle Experiment”, an inventor makes some Frankensteinian monster then has to hunt it down. I am reminded of the comic from 2000 A. D. “Robo-Hunter”.
“The Rannie (Super Science Novels, May 1941) has the hunters become the hunted. Imagine hunting using “copters”!
“The Hunter of the King Planet” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1942) by Carl Selwyn has Cyclophants on Jupiter. That’s some big game hunting!
“Greenface” (Unknown Worlds, August 1943) by James H. Schmitz reminds me of Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” from four years earlier. This is another one of the tales that would inspire The Heap, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing. A swampy tree monster watches and waits until it wants to feed. For more plant monsters of the 1940s, go here.
“The Huntress of Akkan” (Amazing Stories, February 1946) by Robert Moore Williams has Captain Sandy King and his men in the jungles of Asia, where they find the lost city of Akka. They also go up against Avena and her hunters.
“Happy Ending” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1948) by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (as Henry Kuttner) has Tharn come from the future to hunt. He brings a robot along to help. For more on the Pulps of Henry Kuttner, go here.
“The Day of the Hunters” (Future, November 1950) by Isaac Asimov has men who travel back in time to discover why the dinosaurs died out. It’s not an asteroid but hunters of a lizard nature. This story was based on an earlier version called “Big Game” which he wrote in 1941. It appeared in Before the Golden Age (1974).
“Duel on Syrtis” (Planet Stories, March 1951) by Poul Anderson is a classic hunter-prey tale with Riordan trying to add a Martian to his trophy room. Who will win this contest between Earthman and the native of Mars? I kept thinking of Robb White’s later novel, Deathwatch (1972).
“The Hunters” (Startling Stories, March 1952) by Walt Sheldon gives us a short one with aliens hunting men. That simple title will show up again.
“A Sound of Thunder” (Collier’s, June 28, 1952) by Ray Bradbury appeared in a slick first. The tale of time travel and dino-hunting is classic for its use of the butterfly effect. It was reprinted in Planet Stories, January 1954. For more on Ray in Planet Stories, go here.
“The Hunters” (Fantastic Story Quarterly, Fall 1952) by Alfred Coppel gives us a destroyed world where creatures hunted for food. Those hunters were…men.
Conclusion
Home is the Hunter…I have to admit one of my sources for this post was David Drake‘s trio of anthologies: Men Hunting Things and Things Hunting Men (both 1988) and Bluebloods (Men and Things Hunting together (1990). I first got the idea from Roger Zelazny’s Eye of Cat (1982). This novel questions the right of one creature to hunt another as do many of these stories. Some do it by exacting a terrible price upon the hunter. Some by making the man the prey (your own medicine!) The days of Allan Quatermain, the Great White Hunter, are gone.
Many classic hunting stories appeared in the digests after the Pulps: “A Gun For Dinosaur” by L. Sprague de Camp, “Good Night, Mr. James” by Clifford D. Simak, “Collecting Team” by Robert Silverberg, “Ruum” by Arthur Porges, etc. You can find all of these in Drake’s anthologies but I wanted to do the Pulp stories that came before these slicker, largely anti-hunting stories.
Next time … The Lost Cities of Mars….
