If you missed the last one…
Last time I focused on five of the better realized creatures from Wonder Stories. This time I’ve got five more from that magazine. These creatures may not be as well done as that last batch but I find them intriguing all the same. As Clare Winger Harris explained in a letter to the editor and other fans in 1931, Science Fiction themes include at least four monster categories: #5: gigantic insects, #6: gigantic man-eating plants, #8: Monstrous forms of unfamiliar life and #10: The creation of synthetic life. The stories here will fall under #8. You go out into space, you are going to encounter “unfamiliar life” on Mercury, Venus or Neptune. How monstrous it proves depends on the author and how much they love monster stories.
The Cyclops of Neptune
“The Monsters of Neptune” (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1930) by Henrik Dahl Juve begins with two men going to Neptune to explore. Dana Manson and Dutch Hoss have their spaceship destroyed by one of the gigantic cyclops. The creatures are covered with impenetrable scales. They kill it by shooting it in the eye (Shades of Ulysses!) The men find another lost explorer and escape on his ship.
A huge, pale violet-grey gorilla-like beast stood poised above the remains of the ship. It was more bulky than an elephant. Its powerful body was covered with great slab-like scales, that rattled at the least motion. Its wide, ugly head, covered with scales, was frightful. The one eye in the center of its forehead gleamed yellow-violet light of hate and triumph.
Juve sold the rights to the story to a Hollywood studio but it was never made into a film. There was a sequel “The Struggle For Neptune” (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Fall 1930).
The Reptile-Men of Venus
“The Beasts of Ban-da-lu” (Wonder Stories, May 1931) by Ed Earl Repp has the crew of the first exploratory landing on Venus captured by dinosaur-like reptile-men. These semi-intelligent creatures sell them off to another race. The reptile-men have heavy bone structure so guns are not effective against them.
…The creature stood upright like a man, on two scaled, muscular legs ending in broad, two-toed feet. Scaled as he was he looked more like a lizard standing upright, tail dragging, but his arms were well formed and each hand was equipped with long, claw-like fingers of which there were four. That he was no mere savage beast could be seen by a broad belt around his waist, worn apparently for the protection of his vitals from savage claws or predatory animals. His head and features added to his intelligent appearance despite the fact that his cranium was protected by a natural shield of bone or horn that projected backward and down over his neck like the headdress of an American Indian. It was gnarled and horny, but apparently as strong as metal armor.
Non-Protoplasmic Life
“Brood of Helios” (Wonder Stories May June July 1932) by John Bertin is a three-part serial in the tradition of George Allan England. A scientist, his beautiful daughter, and two friends are transported four million years into the future. They encounter a strange new world that includes non-protoplasmic life. These creatures attack the party. The novel veers off into a caveman story that doesn’t really exploit the weird animals much but the first portion includes the monster attack:
Across from Meredith some five yards away, the tangled vegetation had parted and framed the front of a body and head. A nightmare head, long-snouted like a turtle, its mouth quivering slowly while two weird eyes surveyed the terrified humans near the trunks of the pale green ferns. It was a huge thing towering well above them, its body front a dull gray, short-armed and thick-haunched like a kangaroo. And like a kangaroo it hopped, though without any visible lengthening of legs. It hopped out, its fixed grin horrible to see in a shaft of light coming through the trees, its working lower jaw operating mechanically.
The weird bugs appear pretty nasty but prove to be fairly easy to defeat. The humans are more physically able and will make good cavemen.
The Phoceans
“The Master of the Asteroid” (Wonder Stories, October 1932) by Clark Ashton Smith has a man fleeing a failed colony on Mars. He ends up crashing on an asteroid called Phocea. The strange insect-like creatures there worship him like a god. The narrator, who telling us all of this in a journal, dies when a strange mist-like being comes along and enters the spaceship.
The insect-like Phoceans offer us:
Between the thickets, I saw approach of certain living creatures who rose from behind the middle rocks with the suddenness and lightness of leaping insects. They seemed to skim the ground with long, flying steps that were both easy and abrupt…I must liken them to insects. Standing perfectly erect, they towered seven feet in the air. Their eyes, like faceted opals, at the end of curving protractile stalks, rose level with the port. Their unbelievably thin limbs, their stem-like bodies, comparable to those of the phasmidae, or “walking sticks”, were covered with grey-green shards. Their heads, triangular in shape, were flanked with immense, perforated membranes and were fitted with mandibular mouths that seemed to grin eternally.
Clark Ashton Smith is not usually thought of as Science Fiction writer but he did produce a dozen great stories for Gernsback. His style is to be very precise in his descriptions as you can see from this excerpt. His plots are often secondary.
The Mole-Men of Mercury
“The Mole-Men of Mercury” (Wonder Stories, December 1933) by Arthur K. Barnes stars a very unlikely hero. George Gower is a member of the Interplanetary Legion, a force set to protect the inner planets. Like most of IL members, he is a rogue and a criminal. He is sent to Mercury to fight the Mole-Men who have been discovered in the planet’s interior. The humans are mining the planet for exalite. Gower figures out that the Mole-Men are susceptible to volcanic fumes. He is forced on a suicide mission to blow up a volcano and is killed. The coward becomes a hero for he has wiped out the Mole-Men.
The Mole-Men are not affected by the usual ray guns so new weapons are needed:
…A cone of narrow brilliance knifed out, moved in a slow, uneven arc, then stopped abruptly as it fastened on a moving creature. It was a fantastic, nightmare figure. About four feet in height, it was, looking roughly like two eggs set one atop the other– a fat, oblong body covered with reddish hair, and a smaller ovoid head resting on narrow shoulders. The face, which seemed featureless in the uncertain light, twisted and grimaced constantly. Short arms carried a pair of metal instruments shaped much like the ancient miner’s hand-lamp. There were scarcely any legs at all, the base of the body consisting of long, mobile flaps of flesh covered with innumerable powerful suction cups.
Arthur K. Barnes will in only three short years become one of SF’s top alien story writers with his Gerry Carlyle series.
Conclusion
These creatures are strange and intriguing though they lack the detail and ingenuity that other Wonder Stories writers like Jack Williamson, Raymond Z. Gallun and Edmond Hamilton provide. Most often the monsters are there to offer opposition to the heroes. With writers like Ed Earl Repp, these could as easily be Native Americans in a Western, of which he wrote many. The best SF monsters offer more than just bad guys but ideas.
Be sure to check out my non-fiction book, coming out in March. MONSTER! is the first volume from this blog, featuring pieces on monsters from Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction. Pulp writers in all three genres used monsters but for slightly different purposes. The Horror writer wants to give a chill and doesn’t require any logic. Fantasy is after a sense of wondrous magic, and again isn’t required to explain everything. Science Fiction is the most rigorous, having to explain how those creepy crawlers came to exist. Hugo Gernsback recognized this factor and expected some background for the various aliens and slime beasts that appeared in his Scientifiction magazines.
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