Science Fiction. To some it is a literature of ideas, with the intent to explore, to wonder, to question. To others it is a fun-filled adventure category that replaces horses with spaceships and desperados with aliens. Still to others it is an extrapolating extension of the Scientific Method, a way of asking “What if?” Science Fiction has given us a range of motifs including the rocket, the robot, the alien and time travel.
There is another, smaller group of Science Fiction fans (to which I belong) that sees Science Fiction as a vehicle to frighten. Dark SF is a style of writing that has never gained its own moniker (I would never dream of suggesting the unseemly Hor-Sci or Sci-Fright.) This branch of SF takes its power from two connected ideas: SF can explore worlds and dimensions that are unknown to us. H. P. Lovecraft said fear is the strongest emotion, and fear of the unknown the ultimate fear. Instead of seeing all those new worlds as wondrous and inviting, the SF-Horror writer sees them as terrible, filled with lurking evils waiting to infest humanity.
Should this lesser recognized sub-genre of SF be a surprise? Not really. Not when we consider Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) as the first SF novel (as Brian W. Aldiss does). Strip away the Gothic trappings and Frankenstein is a novel about how man’s quest for knowledge leads to destruction. And how many SF novels and stories since did not ask this very question? Hubris, the act of seeking more than you should, is at the heart of all SF. In Mary Shelley’s time all the way to today, Science enters our lives and people ask (in the words of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park): ” Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” GMOs, AI computing, Internet implants in our head, nano-technology, these are the SF ideas come to reality.
After Mary Shelley, early Science Fiction continues in this mode. Edgar Allan Poe creates a killer robot in “Moxon’s Master (1836), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappacini’s Daughter” (1844) and “Dr. Heideigger’s Experiment” (1837) ask hard questions, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), all take their lead from Shelley. Science is involved and it isn’t going to turn out well. It is only with the huge popularity of Jules Verne (1828-1905) that this attitude changes.
The scientific horror story solidifies with H. G. Wells (1866-1946). Precursors and contemporaries to Wells, including the equally famous Verne, usually tended to see the future or trips to the moon as an exciting moment of exploration, usually led by scientists as visionaries. Wells’ brand of SF turns the ‘plausible future’ into an extrapolation from present facts, as in Wells’ “The Land Ironclad” in which he predicted tank warfare fourteen years before 1917. Wells was not interested in what did exist but in chasing an idea to its terrible, if impossible, conclusion.
More important than the technological horrors are Wells’ monsters. The Morlocks, the Beastmen, the Invisible Man and the Martians are classic SF as well as classic horror. The reader is chilled at the moment when the time traveler realizes the state of things in the future, that Eloi are cattle and the Morlocks their herders, or when the narrator is trapped in the beastmen’s hut during the reciting of the litany of the law. “Are we not men?” or when Kemp realizes that the Invisible Man is not simply a victim of an accident but a madman as well, a lunatic armed with invisibility, and finally, this class scene from The War of the Worlds which is worthy of quoting:
And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins. I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal. . . (The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells)
The early novels are well known as are their monsters but it was in short story form that Wells could try any number of horrors. In “The Empire of the Ants”, a riverboat captain battles a race of intelligent ants in the Amazon. Despite the movie version, they are not gigantic but carry lethal weapons.
In “The Country of the Blind”, a mountain climber gets trapped in a valley where everyone is blind. He thinks to become their king but finds his sight no real advantage. When he falls in love with one of the locals, the wisemen say he must be blinded if he wishes to marry. He chooses to die in the mountains instead. The description of the blind men chasing him is eerie.
Wells had human narrators attacked by many strange creatures, including a blood-drinking vine in “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid”, a gigantic bat “In the Avu Observatory” where an astronomer is attacked in his observatory, a prehistoric bird in “Aepyornis Island” when a shipwrecked man hatches a prehistoric egg then must battle with the giant bird when it is grown. He also uses ocean creatures in “In the Abyss” where he supposes a race of aquatic beings that are discovered by a scientist who reaches the sea bottom in a diving bell. And in the simpler “The Sea Raiders” cephalopods attack a British seaside resort. Last but certainly not least is “The Valley of the Spiders” where a group of men hunt a couple in a valley inhabited by intelligent and organized spiders.
Wells wasn’t limited to creepy-crawlies. In another series of tales he explores the ideas around the supernatural. The best is “The Plattner Story” which tells of a man who is thrown outside time and space by an explosion. In this other-existence he sees many strange and frightening things including heads which watch over the living. He explores possession in “The Late Mr. Elvesham” and “The Stolen Body”, ghosts in “The Inexperienced Ghost”, haunted houses in “The Red Room” and jungle magic in “Pollock and the Porrah Man”. These stories are less effective than his monster tales.
Wells turns SF back from the Voyages Fantasque of Verne into a varied path, one that can contain all emotions including terror. Dystopic visions of the future like George Orwell’s 1984 (1948) or Zamyatin’s We (1924) owe their freedom to imagine the worst from Wells.
In the early Pulps, monsters were common. Edgar Rice Burroughs and his imitators supplied a steady stream of weird beasts and amazing creatures. The intent was not to frighten the reader but to amaze or excite. It takes a special writer working in the Wellsian tradition to create both fantastic and horrific creatures. Here is a typical Burroughsian monster mash-up:
In the dim half-light of the Venusan night I saw confronting me a creature that might be conjured only in the half-delirium of some horrid nightmare. It was about as large as a full-grown puma, and stood upon four handlike feet that suggested that it might be almost wholly arboreal. The front legs were much longer than the hind, suggesting, in this respect, the hyena; but here the similarity ceased, for the creature’s furry pelt was striped longitudinally with alternate bands of red and yellow, and its hideous head bore no resemblance to any earthly animal. No external ears were visible, and in the low forehead was a single large, round eye at the end of a thick antenna about four inches long. The jaws were powerful and armed with long, sharp fangs, while from either side of the neck projected a powerful chela. Never have I seen a creature so fearsomely armed for offense as was this nameless beast of another world. With those powerful crablike pincers it could easily have held an opponent far stronger than a man and dragged it to those terrible jaws. (Pirates of Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs)
This pile of weird organs would be hard for a more stringent SF writer to explain. What possible evolutionary force could create such a chimera? Burroughs wasn’t concerned about answering that question, only to give his new arrival on Amtor a shock and a monster for his new friends to rescue him from.
Many SF writers in the 1920s and 1930s were not yet restricted by the John W. Campbell Golden Age of Science Fiction that would focus SF into more respectable lines. One of the best of these was A. Merritt (1884-1943) who wrote weird SF as often as pure Fantasy. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit” (All-Story, January 5, 1918) was an influential story that later writers like Jack Williamson and Henry Kuttner would imitate. The story has an explorer in the Arctic find an ancient city inhabited by evil glowing lights. Merritt would also write the Throckmorton series with The Moon Pool (1919) (evil frog beings in the South Seas) and The Metal Master (1920) where a living metal tries to infect the world.
Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was a poet who turned to Pulp fiction for money. He is best remembered for bejeweled Fantasy stories about Hyperborea, Medieval French Averoigne and the future world of Zothique, but he also wrote his own brand of weird SF. These stories include the adventures of Captain Volmar in “Marooned in Andromeda” and “The Amazing Planet” as well as his version of Mars that contains scheming Martians, underground face-eating slime and plant aliens bent on dominating the universe. His most famous series revolves around the mysterious “The City of the Singing Flame” in which a calling entity summons dwellers irresistibly to their doom. He wrote these stories for Hugo Gernsback until a disagreement over editing brought them to an end.
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is the acknowledged master of 20th Century horror with his tales of Cthulhu and the Innsmouth spawn. But in three stories he was published not in Weird Tales but in Science Fiction magazines. “The Colour Out of Space” appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories with its haunted farmhouse infected with a sickness from outer space. Astounding Stories, edited by F. Orlin Tremaine before John Campbell took over, gave us “At the Mountains of Madness” (February-April 1936) and then “The Shadow Out of Time” (June 1936). In these stories we still have monsters but they use advanced alien science rather than magic.
The Science Fiction magazines spawned by Hugo Gernsback after 1926 drew SF back towards the Vernian model, but SF would not be limited to gadget fiction. John W. Campbell, the man who innovated SF with the magazine Astounding also wrote one of the masterworks of SF Horror, “Who Goes There?” a tale of a team of scientists in Antarctica who discover an alien that can take its form from others. Campbell’s intent was both to frighten but also present his monster as logically as possible.
Of course I have missed mentioning several of favorites through the last hundred years. Books like Richard Matheson’s I, Legend (1954), Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires (1976) (not so much the film made from it) and Basil Cooper’s The Great White Space (1974). Pulp stories like “The Cosmic Horror” by Richard F. Searight (Wonder Stories, August 1933), “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson (Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1963), Arthur Porges “The Ruum” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1953) and “Second Variety” by Phil K. Dick (Space Science Fiction, May 1953). And the examples go on and on.
Since the days of Campbell, SF has been wide open to all types of stories, including the Horror SF tale. It is Hollywood that has made things harder for writers. The B-Movies of the 1950s and 60s filled movie screens with giant locusts, space children and 50-Foot Women. This schlock treatment of Horror SF has made it harder to frighten audiences but with films like John Carpenter’s The Thing (based on Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”) and the Alien series the movie industry as undone some of the damage. New films and television shows that view SF’s old wonder as being closer to terror include Jeff Vander Meer’s Annihilation (2018) with a mysterious world inside an alien bubble, while George R. R. Martin’s Nightflyers (2019) gave us a haunted house in space.
