Hugo Gernsback’s Creatures of Wonder Stories III

If you missed the last one…

This post is brought to you by Whispers of Ice and Sand, a collection of Space Westerns and Space Opera. The planet Utukku is covered in whispering sands that will hold no track for longer than a minute. Try tracking a deadly killer in such an environment. Deputy Neely tries his best, fighting dangerous trog warriors and sulking bandits in such climes. Inspired by Louis L’Amour and other Western writers and the Science Fiction of Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, these are Space Opera adventures with a cowboy feel.

Wonder Stories was not the only SF Pulp that offered travel tales to other planets where strange and unusual creatures lived, but Hugo Gernsback used more of these tales than some editors. Or else it was the great writers he featured (soon to lose to better paying markets) like Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Raymond Z. Gallun and many others. Later, Mort Weisinger would take over this kind of story at the new Thrilling Wonder Stories, the same magazine, but not really, with writers like Arthur K. Barnes and his Interplanetary Huntress, Gerry Carlyle.

Here is another batch of stories that featured aliens a little more interesting than just people with green skin or vague descriptions. The challenge, as ever, is to make a creature that belongs on the surface of the Moon or some other strange planetoid. Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us some classic chimeras but the later SF writers like Jack Williamson work harder to make their monsters logical scientifically. A cool monster is always fun but a well thought out one is even better.

Ganymedians

“The Outpost on the Moon” Part 3 (Wonder Stories, February 1931) by Joslyn Maxwell was a one-hit novel that takes men to the Moon then on a second expedition to Ganymede where they are captured by carrot-like aliens:

There could be no doubt that the creature standing before us was a rational being despite its fantastic appearance. A walking carrot — a fish on stilts–but no simile can describe the apparition which met our astonished gaze. On the large end of the body, which faced toward us, a broad, wicked mouth and two enormous eyes represented a face which nevertheless lacked any suggestion of a nose. The head joined directly to a tapering body, slanted downward toward the rear. Two pairs of legs as poorly matched as those of a giraffe raised the creature on skinny supports to a height of five feet at its forward end. Behind the head, where there should have been a neck and shoulders, projected something like a pair of arms, jointed at the center and again near the ends. Here they divided into the tentacle-like fingers several inches in length. The arms must have measured fully four feet from body to tip. Save for a belt about its midsection the creature was unprotected by clothing or fur, exposing a shiny slate-gray skin to the weather. In its left “hand” it carried a weapon which I judged to be sort of rifle. It consisted of a bright metal tube a couple of feet long fastened to a cylindrical chamber several inches in diameter. The creature grasped the weapon in its skinny tentacles, half raising it as though in doubt whether to turn it on us.

The Ganymedians possess fingered hands that they use for their communications, flashing signals to each other silently. We get a fuller description of the body:

…Each hand had six fingers of nearly equal size, about eight inches long. There were five joints in each, which were capable of bending in both directions, enabling the hand to close either forward or backward. There were likewise six toes (if they may be called such) on each foot, but with only one joint in each, and entirely covered with a scaly substance, instead of the nail at the tip of the corresponding human members. The skin of the creature was likewise scaly and glistening like that of a fish.

Prying open the mouth, the doctor discovered that there was no tongue, explaining the lack of an articulate language among the creatures. between the head and shoulders were tiny openings which evidently served as ears, though their form suggested that they might be remnants of what had been gills in prehistoric times. The striking resemblance of many physical characteristics to those of water creatures of the earth pointed to the possibility that they were akin to that family, having perhaps emerged from their abode in the ocean to evolve into intelligent creatures on land.

The Ganymedians possess weapons, a blow-gun pistol that lobs poisoned darts. The Earthmen are attacked then made prisoners by the locals, which prove to be yokels and not the dominant branch of their species. The author suggests a vegetable nature then a fishy one.

The Inhabitants of Eros

“An Adventure on Eros” (Wonder Stories, September 1931) by J. Harvey Haggard has a situation with electro asteroids making the earth ship attracted to the planetoid. This near disaster angers the local fauna, tentacular creatures that attack the ship:

…From the rocky surface of the planet below the weird metallic inhabitants of Eros were floating upward–creatures with a tiny ring of eyes about the upper portion of the cylindrical body. A vast squadron of the creatures were materializing from a series of what looked like ant mounds, and they maneuvered swiftly upward.

The humans are prepared to shoot them with laser cannons but they don’t work. In fact, the entire thing is a mental projection used for training purposes. Haggard doesn’t use the creatures particularly well but Frank R. Paul does. For more on J. Harvey Haggard, go here.

Alpha Centaurians

“Beyond Pluto” (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1932) by John Scott Campbell is a short novel with Egyptian archaeology then a lost race called the Zongainians and finally exile to the planet Dunsaan near Alpha Centauri. It is here the heroes of the story encounter some very inhuman aliens:

White, about four feet high, two-legged, like men, but there the resemblance ended. The whole upper portion of their bodies was covered with a rubbery white mantle of skin under which a score or more flexible and retractive tentacles undulated. The brain was contained in a limp lobe at the top of the mantle; the mouth, as we later found, lay underneath. The creature’s single eye, fastened on the tip of one tentacle, constantly swayed back and forth as it walked. Looking at them one had an unforgettable sensation of flabby bonelessness—of a certain softness such as is associated with polyps. I think Prof. Pfeiffler was the only one not overcome with revulsion.

The Alpha Centaurians think the Earthmen are Zongainian spies and don’t trust them. Though this isn’t quite true, the humans do play a part in the Alpha Centaurians losing the war and Zongainians treat the Earthmen as heroes, allowing them to go home. This story is by the other great “John Campbell” of early Science Fiction.

The Lunarians

“The Moon Plague” (Wonder Stories, January 1934) by Raymond Z. Gallun features a Moon that has a race of tall, tentacular moon-men that fall under the rule of a crazed earthman, Garth.

…It had stood perhaps eighteen feet tall. Its two stalky, many-jointed legs were covered with countless matted brown fibres, resembling roots. A tough, leathery mantle of bright leaf-green, oddly reminiscent of a military cape, hung over its spiny ovoid body. From the edge of this, its tactile tendrils, or tentacles, projected. The creature had no head. At the top of its body was a sort of hard brown shell, resembling the calyx of an enormous flower. It was not difficult to imagine that when the occasion demanded, the plant-man’s entire vulnerable anatomy, including his long legs, could be drawn into, and sealed in this shell, which might serve as a protection during the intense cold of the lunar nights. Sprouting from between the sections of this integument, was a long forked stalk, bearing two globular organs. One of these was clearly an eye; the other seemed to be a light-producing organ like those of fireflies, for even after the creature was dead, the globe had emitted a faint, greenish glow.

The Lunarians use the light-emitting orb to flash communications to each other, which are picked up by the eye tentacle. Garth has a code book where he has written down certain words or commands to be sent by his own impromptu red-green flasher.

The Lunarians have a secret cavern under Crystal Mountain that contains a forest of plants that are fed by the magnified sunlight that comes through the crystal. In this cavern is breathable air and a lake where the Lunarians set their roots to drink and feed. There are purple cacti that grow around the lake that give the Lunarians the medicinal elements necessary to combat the Lunar fungi that is the titular plague.

The Lunarians attack Steve and Claire at Garth’s direction. The plant-men have great strength in their tentacles, twisting and pinching limbs to create pain if not dismember their captives. The Lunarians are not inherently vicious but were acting under Garth’s warning that the others were enemies. For more on this story, go here.

The Crater-Beast

“Red Moon” (Wonder Stories, December 1935) by Kenneth Sterling features tentacular beasties on the Moon. These beasts curl up to assume the look of craters then spring on the unwary.

…On the seemingly placid moon lurked an unsuspected peril. The “lost” explorers had fallen prey to the so-called lunar octopus or crater-beast. Although there is no atmosphere on the moon, the crater-beasts lived by extracting the carbon and oxygen which exists in some compounds in lunar minerals from the rocks and ground. The animal could utilize carbon and oxygen in any form whatsoever, and for that reason could exist on the airless satellite. The crater-beasts were huge, eight-limbed creatures, like hard granite in nature and appearance. They possessed none of the human senses…but had the single uncanny power of detecting the proximity of carbon and oxygen. So when the first human beings arrived on the moon with their abundant bodily store of these elements plus the vast reservoirs of oxygen in their artificial breathing apparatus, they were hounded by virtually all of the satellite’s lumbering octopi. The sluggish crater-beasts never attempted to pursue the nimble earth-men who could move with increased speed because of the moon’s lesser gravity. They resorted, instead, to much subtler methods of ensnaring their prey. The octopus lay on the ground with its eight twenty-foot, multi-jointed tentacles coiled about in such a way that it closely simulated one of the miniature craters, so common on the moon, hence the animal’s name. When some hapless explorer passed too near the “crater”, a tentacle darted out and seized him, holding him in an iron grip which nothing could dislodge. The captive’s body was then drawn to the monster’s main mass and drained by a queer organ of all its carbon and oxygen, being finally reduced to elemental dust. Often one of a group of men was captured and his companions were helpless to do ought but observe his tortured demise, while futilely firing what they knew to be ineffective explosive bullets at the octopus.

Miner Dic R35 gets caught by one of these octopi but is lucky enough to escape. The attacker is bumped by another crater-beast, allowing Ric to break free. He uses his weapon as a propelling jet to fly away from the tentacles. Sterling is not the scientist these other writers are, having a liking for the Lovecraftian feel rather than the Gernsbackian idea. Sterling would write “In the Walls of Eryx” (Weird Tales, October 1939) with the Providence master of Cosmic Horror.

Conclusion

Cool aliens have always been part of the best of Science Fiction. Look at the Alien franchise, which served up the same old thing in Alien: Romulus (2024) and keeps on going. We are fascinated by those face huggers and insectoid warrior bugs. H. R. Giger designed the originals with plenty of subversive sexual undertones. (This last outing these seemed more obvious to me than in previous films. Not sure why.) The aliens are disturbing, and by now rather predictable, but I have yet to miss one of them.

The men who wrote these stories weren’t quite as horror-oriented with the exception of Sterling but they have done their work well. None of the creatures feels like a hugely impossible thing, that evolution has been at work here. That is the key to designing good aliens: what forces in their environments would push them to develop tentacles, bark-like skin, and most important, intelligence. These are early SF tales so the writers aren’t as picky as some modern writers but I think they made an effort that elevates these stories beyond white men shooting green men.

 

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