Jack Williamson’s fascinating tale from February 1932, “The Moon Era” got me wondering about what other monsters Hugo had published in Wonder Stories. Surely there must be dozens of intriguing alien races, singular monsters and other fascinating creatures from the field’s top writers. Some of these tales are familiar like Hamilton’s “A Conquest of Two Worlds” which ended up in his Best of Edmond Hamilton (1977), but most are largely forgotten.
Most of the art in this post was done by the fantastic Frank R. Paul. As much as Hugo’s editorial direction, Paul’s illustrations set the standard for early Scientifiction. His covers are always garishly colorful but never dull. His illustrations are crammed with detail. The background is often more important than the humans who run through them.
As always with this time period, it is interesting to see what critic, E. F. Bleiler, has to say about these old stories in Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years (1998). Most comments are similar to “A silly story” but occasionally he likes one. Rarely does he focus on the monsters, which I suppose is to be expected since he is looking at themes and quality of writing. I, on the other hand, will forgive all kinds of bad writing for a good monster.
Here are five of the better ones:
“The Bat-Men of Mars” by Wood Jackson (Air Wonder Stories, May 1930, Wonder Stories June July 1930) was a serial that crossed over to Wonder Stories from Air Wonder. It follows two scientists, Fry and Randolph, and the female stowaway, Alicia, to the planet Mars. This planet is inhabited by some pretty ordinary humans in two rival cities (ala Edgar Rice Burroughs). Fortunately, to keep things interesting, there is also the winged gorillas known as the Bat-Men:
These beasts were to live long in the memory of the two human beings who fought them and slew them in great numbers. The creatures had no weapons, but it could not be doubted that in a hand to hand encounter they would be formidable. Suggesting the gorilla somewhat in facial features, the Bat-men were covered with rough, coarse hair from head to foot. With powerful torsos and slender legs, they suggested the bat, for stretched along their thick, heavy arms were membranes that enabled them to fly with great rapidity. In size they were larger than human beings.
The Bat-men, despite being the titular creature, aren’t all that important to the story. The rest sinks into a strange H. Rider Haggard-esque prophecy and fall of regime. The humans, of course, leave the planet in shambles and go home, one Martian babe in tow. Not Williamson-class material, alas.
For more on alien space bats, go here.
Much better is “The Terrors of Aryl” by R.F. Starzl (Wonder Stories, March 1931), set on the supposed planet of Aryl that sits between the Sun and Mercury. The small jungle-covered planet is protected by strange orbital lens that cause the inhabitants issues with vision but protect it from the Sun’s immense heat. Two space cops from the Interplanetary Flying Patrol crash land when the space pirate, Nirvo, spots them and shoots them down. Their only hope of survival is to cross the danger-filled landscape to Nirvo’s hidden base and steal a spaceship.
The Unicorn Birds
On this journey they encounter a number of big, nasty beasts. The first is the Unicorn Birds. Huge in size, they kill their prey with long spear-like horns.
As he watched the bird suddenly spread out until it was of enormous size, fully seventy feet from wing-tip to wing-tip. Plunging downward at him, it emitted a raucous scream, its great claw-shaped ten-toed feet spread out. Its bill, at least ten feet long, and lined with countless ragged teeth, gaped open… Hi arms closed around a thick, leathery neck, as big as around as a barrel and slippery with an evil-smelling oil.
Emsinger evades the massive flyer by diving under the thick moss that covers the ground of Aryl. The Unicorn Bird follows him, stabbing at him with its beak. The corporal is rescued by Henley, who lights the bird on fire. Being oil, it catches quickly. He scares off its mate with the flame too.
The Tripods
Leaving the ship, the two spacemen cross the jungle where they encounter the Tripods.
…Standing on three many-jointed legs, with an odd air of ease and unconcern, it looked disquietingly assured and competent…Light as thistledown it seemed to float through the air, but when the spherical body struck Henley, it knocked him down and almost crushed him flat. The frail-looking stick-like arms became pliable, coiled around him with the strength of steel bands…
Henley uses his Unicorn Bird horn-spear but it is Emsinger’s bone club that proves more effective against the weird beings. The Tripods attack in a group but the two men kill them, breaking open their round bodies, which break like papier mache globes. The tentacular arms are dangerous but the pumpkin shell bodies are their weakness.
The One-Eyed Monster
This is the one Marchioni drew for the illustration. The two men are stopped by a flooding river. They are stranded in a tree, surrounded by spiny plants. Stuck there, a gigantic beast comes along and begins eating all the other stranded sandrats and eventually turns it singular eye onto the men.
Something parted the water, fitfully revealed. Something with a broad, shiny back at least fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. Something with an enormous domed head at the top of which was a shuttered bony hood. It came with the current, but not helplessly, directing its course purposefully with quick, sturdy strokes of its legs or paddles. A broad, blunt snout parted the thorny branches…The hood opened, revealing a single, hexagonal eye that stared up into the tree fishily…Instead of the usual horizontally working jaw familiar to all zoologists, this creature’s jaws flexed sideways opening on a vertical line.
The water rises and the monster’s long tongue gets closer and closer until a giant log smashes the beast, killing it. The men jump onto the log and ride it to a cave where they find access to Nirvo’s hideout. As most Pulp SF tales of the time went, they find beautiful women prisoners, shoot their way out and end up planning a wedding. E. Bleiler says: “This last romantic touch spoils what had been a competent adventure story.” He’s right. The best part of the story really is the monsters.
Various Mentions
Starzl populates his planet with many inventive creatures large and small. predating both Stanley G. Weinbaum and Arthur K. Barnes by at least four years. (I have often said that Starzl went before Weinbaum, who gets all the glory for some reason.) Some of these beasties include the long-snouted rabbit-roaches, white rock beetles, well-eels, araboids, and “sleek, mottled sandrats”. None of these get more than the briefest of mentions but they add verisimilitude to the setting.
“A Conquest of Two Worlds” by Edmond Hamilton (Wonder Stories, February 1932) was chosen by Leigh Brackett for The Best of Edmond Hamilton (1976). She wrote:
He became irritated with the stereotypical rendering of Earthmen as heroes with a divine right to conquer other planets, which were always inhabited by stereotypical nasty monsters. “A Conquest of Two Worlds,” which appeared in Gernsback’s Wonder Stories in February of 1932, was a landmark story that made a profound impression on its readers. In a remarkably realistic, bitter, and downbeat fashion, it questioned the philosophy of the “Earthman’s burden” and the rightness of territorial wars, and it portrayed the aliens as sympathetic victims of aggression rather than the brainless menaces of the lookout-they’re-coming-over-the-rocks” type of thing which was so common in those days. Atom bombs are tossed about here with rather too much abandon, even assuming small tactical weapons; but then, the happy folk of 1932 had never seen an atom bomb and could only guess at what it might do. This is a technicality, and in no way lessens the power of the story.
Hamilton features two alien races: the Martians and the Jovians. The humans are greedy and war-like (too to nature!) and all the daring-do and battles don’t excite rah-rah-rah but grimness. Hamilton reportedly had some Cherokee blood in his ancestry and certainly could feel for the oppressed.
The Martians
Then, too, there were the Martians. The first contact of Drake’s party with them was amicable enough. The big furry man-like beings, strange looking to the Earthmen with their huge expanded chests and stilt-like limbs, emerged from the vegetation oases to greet Drake’s men as friends. News of Gillen’s visit had traveled over part of Mars, at least, for these Martians had heard of it.
The Earthmen wipe out two thirds of the Martians, reducing them to beggars and derelicts. The tacticts the humans used against the Martians are again used on the Jovians.
The Jovians
He managed a safe landing on that giant planet and found it without oceans, warm and steamy and clad from pole to pole with forests of great fern growths. A strange fauna inhabited these forests and the highest forms of life. The Jovians, as Gillen called them, were erect-walking creatures with big, soft hairless bodies and with thick arms and legs ending in flippers instead of hands or feet. Their heads were small and round, with large dark eyes. They lived peacefully in large communities in the fern forests, on fruits and roots. They had few weapons and were of child-like friendliness.
In the end, one of a trio of friends, Halkett can’t stand what the human race has done to the aliens. He tries to help the Martians but ends up in prison. After his release he goes to Jupiter to help the Jovians. He and his fighters lose the struggle and blow themselves up. This tale was, along with “The Island of Unreason” a good indication of the kind of Hamilton story that can say something important as well as thrill.
The Ledi
“The Moon Mistress” by Raymond Z. Gallun (Wonder Stories, May 1932) is like something out of Sax Rohmer with a radium mine belonging to Jack Joywater being taken over by evil Orientals who worship the long gone Lunarians. We even get an opium den on the Moon. All that aside, Gallun does give us the Ledi, six inch Moon Ants . He logically works out how these insects could survive on the Moon. Parks the old Moon veteran and archaeologist, and Grey are stranded without air. They cover themselves in something sweet to make the Ledi think they have discovered food. When they find food, the ants create an air bubble around it to prevent it from escaping out into space. The two men refill their air tanks and go after the cultists. Frank R. Paul chose the Ledi scene for the illustration.
Later the two are about to be captured and Parks takes Grey prisoner. The narrator, along with Jack Joywater and the now defeated Mekal, are to be sacrificed to the god of the Mu-Lo cult, the giant mechanical Ledi in a vast temple cave (Paul cover). The walls of the cave show man-size Ledi bearing weapons. The ants of the Moon were once intelligent and much larger. Parks shoots the wall restricting a horde of savage Ledi and rescues Grey and Joywater. The evil queen and all the cultists are eaten by the escaping ants. Joywater gets his mine and Parks his evidence of intelligent beings on the Moon long ago. Bleiler calls the story “Confusing” but I didn’t find it so. It’s pure Indiana Jones on the Moon.
“Hell Planet” by Leslie F. Stone (Wonder Stories, June 1932) has humans discover a radioactive substance called cosmicite. This element allows ships to cross the cosmos but is rare. The Earthmen are quite happy to discover lots of it on Vulcan. The only problem is expose to the planet will sicken and kill anyone from Earth. The radiation is not harmful to the local lifeforms, including several types of birds:
Vulcan Fauna
He pointed out flocks of tiny birds, no larger than humming birds darting among the fruit, the swarms of insects feeding in armies, the dainty head of some animal feeding on fruit fallen to the ground.
Another creature that looked like a cross between a bear and a monkey was climbing a tall tree toward an especially appetizing cluster of fruit hanging by a slender cord from a vine. The fruit proved just out of reach of the animal, but with infinite patience the bear angled for the prize with long forelegs. At last, unable to gain the fruit by that means, it let go its hold upon the tree-trunk to make a lunge for the fruit cluster, and landed upon it with all four feet. The vine held and the animal went about the prosaic business of harvesting its dinner without a care as to what would happen when it ate away its support.
A shadow fell against the trees and ground. Glancing up the men saw an unusually large, brightly-plumaged bird plunging downward. Through the thick walls of the ship they could not hear its cry, but they could see its paralyzing effect upon the flock of humming birds which for the nonce seemed suspended on quivering wings unable to move forward or backward. The killer had time to swoop down, gobble a third of their number before their brains began to function properly again, and they could escape.
The Vulcanites
The intelligent beings are the Vulcanites. The first humans to come to planet set themselves up as gods but died from the radiation. The Vulcanites are more leery of the second expedition.
The face and body were bare of hair, the skin a slate brown. The body was proportionately slender to its height, in repose it leaned forward so that the thin arms dangled below the knee. Hands like the face were free of fur, delicately-boned, almost claws…For two days no attempt was made to communicate with the strange little “men” of Vulcan. All the crew were now familiar with their bizarre appearance, their foxlike faces, their twitching ears that always seemed in movement, their stiff gawky walk, their strangely shiny bodies. For the most part they seemed unarmed, only a few carried a strange type of ridiculously small bows and arrows. What interested the Tellurians the most was the fact that the arrows and a few spears that appeared now and then were tipped with white metal cosmicite! The metal seemed in common use among the Vulcanites, yet at the same time was held in veneration. They wore strings of it about their necks from which dangled either round nuggets of the same material, or tiny, crudely-carved figurines, amulets. They wore queer elbow and knee-shields of cosmicite, curved plates that fitted over the joints and were held in place with thongs. Some had bits of cosmicite wire twisted about both head and body, and a few carried broad round shields of it on the left arm.
The second expedition goes the way of the first, with men abandoning their protective suits and dying from radiation. Only Jimson doesn’t and walks away with a fortune in cosmicite. The author takes the time to comment on human greed and colonization. Bleiler called the story “Routine.”
Conclusion
These aren’t the only Creatures from Wonder Stories. I have written about some previously and didn’t want to repeat myself. The Batrachs from John Wyndham’s “Exiles on Asperus” are a favorite. Carl Jacobi did a Lovecraftian tale set on Earth in “The Tomb From Beyond” with a big spider-serpent and others. Richard F. Seabright gave us a Lovecraftian energy-eater in “The Cosmic Horror”. All of his Plant Monsters are here. Robots are here. Hugo had a good teacher in H. G. Wells, a classic author he reprinted many times in the early days of Amazing Stories.
Next time...five more monsters!
