Jack Williamson in Weird Tales

Jack Williamson (1908-2006) is considered one of the great pioneers of quality Science Fiction. He, like his buddy Edmond Hamilton, had the strange idea of making a living at writing Science Fiction. Not writing Westerns or Mysteries with SF on the side (like Fredric Brown did), but writing SF full-time. In an age that supported two or three magazines, this was audacious. Maybe even insane.

But by the summer of 1932, Williamson and Edmond Hamilton had made enough money from writing that they wanted to spend some time adventuring. They chose to do this by going down the Mississippi River in a rowboat. The trip ended with their craft sunk after striking a large vessel.

During that trip Williamson came up with new stories to write:

“Another novelette was ‘The Wand of Doom,’ a horror story with local color I had picked up along the Mississippi. Revised after rejection by Strange Tales, it became my first sale to Weird Tales, published in the October issue, 1932…. I recall Farnsworth Wright, its longtime editor, with a special fondness… He told me ‘The Wand of Doom’ was the most popular story he had run in two years…” (The Early Williamson, 1975)

Williamson, though he was writing for a horror magazine, was usually writing Science Fiction with a horrific feel. As he explained many years later in an interview: “…even when I write fantasy stories, I always try to make an appeal to scientific possibility.”

“The Wand of Doom” (Weird Tales, October 1932) has Edwin Walters, who once knew the Telfair brothers, Paul and Verne, going into the bayous of Louisiana to find out what happened to the two men. He knows they were conducting experiments with large machines. He finds the abandoned devices and a skull that he identifies as Paul’s. It has two holes in it as if bitten by two large fangs. Walters enlists a Cajun named Henri Dubois. Dubois gives him a journal by Verne Telfair that tells the real story. Paul had invented a machine that could produce anything you can imagine, what he called his “Wand of Science”.

The two go to the swamp to experiment in private. Paul admits that his aim is to resurrect the girl who died before he could marry her. He creates a fairy castle that lights itself and then living tissue in a butterfly. And finally a human being, Elaine. Life goes on with Paul and Elaine living happily, until one night Paul’s sleepwalking takes him to the lab and the wand. He has a terrible nightmare based on a trauma from when he was a child, a box of tarantulas spilling on him. Elaine is transformed by the new thoughts and becomes a giant spider, biting and killing Paul. Verne flees into the swamp while the house and monster dissolve as the wand’s effects loses power.

From the letter column, The Eyrie: George N. Herflick, of Mantua, Ohio wrote: “Jack Williamson’s The Wand of Doom is a great piece of science fiction. There are basic laws underlying that story which will cause it to dragged forth from musty attics one day and hailed as a prophecy.” The story was voted the best of the issue.

Williamson followed up his success with a novel, Golden Blood (Weird Tales, April-September 1933) in the A. Merritt mode.  He wrote of the composing of the novel:

“But my chief project, that winter, was the novel Golden Blood. That was before I built my own small cabin on the ranch, and I remember working till dawn, night after night, by a kerosene lamp in the family living room, after everyone else was in bed.

The setting was the Arabian desert, which I had never seen. My interest in the oriental had been excited by the Weird Tales writers, especially by E. Hoffman Price. I culled details from travel books and sprinkled the narrative a bit too freely with phrases of third hand Arabic.

In a serious effort to break into Argosy, I constructed the story as a six part serial, with a dramatic break at the end of each 10,000-word installment. After a good deal of cutting and revising, I re-typed the whole manuscript. This was the first time I had ever spent so much time on a story, and I mailed it out with high hopes. As usual, however, Argosy returned it, even though the editors liked ‘the nice color.’ I sent it to Wright. He accepted it promptly and ran it in Weird Tales for the months of April through September 1933. The first two parts had stunning covers by J. Allen St. John, the great Burroughs illustrator, and the readers applauded it.” (The Early Williamson)

Williamson’s choice of name for his hero, Price Durand, is a little secret nod to E. Hoffman Price, no doubt.

The Kirkus Review summed up Golden Blood thus:

“The serviceable plot of H. Rider Haggard’s She rides again–in Williamson’s 1933 magazine tale (now revised) of the golden city of Anz, home of a lost race cloaked in the mists of antiquity. Once again a woman awaits the reincarnation of the man she loved but murdered: slave girl Aysa, literally golden, has been reborn after centuries to reenact her old murder. And, meanwhile, high priestess Vekyra rides about on a gigantic yellow tiger, has mirrors that cast vast images afar, and lusts for Price Durand, a world-weary soldier of fortune and American millionaire who leads his “Secret Legion” to uncover the golden mazes of Anz. Anz is situated on a live crater that sends up a pollen-like mineral dust that is basically gold and has some mysterious traces in it that provide very, very long life–and so it goes. . . until Price and Vekyra meet in preordained struggle on the rope bridge over the green-misted crater where one or the other must die. Familiar fantasy-magazine fare; of its kind–not bad at all.”

Williamson wrote eight stories for Weird Tales between 1932 and 1938 but only “The Wand of Doom” and the last part of “Golden Blood” were voted reader favorites for the issues in which they appeared. Only one of his Weird Tales stories appear in The Early Williamson, partly due to their length.

Williamson presents many miracles like the gigantic vision of man, woman and tiger that was on the cover, or the death ray that leaps out of the sky but explains it all away in the best Gothic Explique fashion:

“Bright metal glittered a full hundred yards beyond the group of ragged, smoking, shell-torn craters, a fantastic device of glistening brass, of
shimmering crystal, surmounted with a huge, ellipsoid mirror, scintillant with a silvery fulgor.

A single man in blue bent behind the machine.

This uncanny mechanism, Price knew, was what had killed Mustafa. Would the tank’s light armor be sufficient protection against the terrific cold that had frozen the Arab rigid in a split second? He thought not.” (Golden Blood by Jack Williamson)

All throughout Williamson’s time at Weird Tales, readers will compare him to Fantasy writer, A. Merritt. This is justified as Merritt was a strong influence on the young Jack. His first story “The Metal Man” has a pilot fly through a weird cloud of energy in a remote place then finds his body slowly becoming metal. In The early Williamson he write about March 1929: “Somehow, I persuaded A. Merritt to let me collaborate with him on a serial for Argosy, which was then one of the top adventure pulps, paying five or six cents a word…At school that fall, I spent the fourday Thanksgiving recess writing 20,000 words of the story, The Purple Mountain…Merritt never returned the manuscript, and I suppose it no longer exists. His comment was short and not very committal.” (The Early Williamson)

Despite their never working together, Williamson continued to work in this vein: strange places, weird alien beings and most specific, a lone survivor of a lost civilization older than man, were all common elements in Merritt’s classic stories. The Face in the Abyss (1923) features the Snake Mother, the template for Williamson’s Athonee and Maru-Mora. The Dwellers in the Mirage (1932) takes place in the Arctic and features another luring evil.

“The Plutonian Terror” (Weird Tales, October 1933) has Ellis the inventor of the Cosmobile, a spaceship, and his co-pilot Kenning, an injured man who has his face wrapped in bandages and speaking in a rough voice, returning to Earth after a trip to the Moon. They see a gigantic metal cube leave Earth’s orbit before they arrive. They can get no radio signals but return to the home of Professor Durand. Ellis had fled his daughter, Tempest, but now wants to admit his love for her. They find no one at the house, dust covering everything. The radio and telephone also produce no one.

The two men search the planet but find no one. They do find countless ships from other countries abandoned at the docks. In Oakland they discover a massive area that has been cleared and mined for aluminum. Ellis and Kenning reason that alien technology was used to mine the metal and make the giant cube.

They follow the trajectory of the cube to the planet Pluto. The lifeless planet has a gigantic pit dug into it. At the bottom of the pit they find old ruins. Strange men with see-through bodies attack them but they shoot them down with rifle and pistol. Then the strange music comes and the two men are drawn against their will to the center of the ruins. They now understand how the humans who had been taken had been drawn to the cube.

At the center they find a giant brain with insectoid eyes and a beak. The thing has no body but is kept alive by machines. Ellis had surmised since Pluto was the oldest planet that its creatures would be the farthest along the evolutionary line. Here was that creature, the last of its race, hungry and controlling. It bites Kenning in the throat. Ellis gets over the freezing in his brain and shoots the thing with his revolver but doesn’t kill it.

The brain has more of the weird, radioactive zombies attack. Kenning uses the revolver butt to try and crack the glass tanks that feed the brain. Things look bad when the brain dies suddenly of the germs on the pistol bullets, having no resistance to Earthly bugs. The zombies drop too, no longer being controlled by the brain. Free of the monster’s control, Kenning and Ellis go to the silver cube hoping to find any survivors. All the humans, millions of them lying on stretchers, are see-through and dead.

The duo return to their ship and leave Pluto. Ellis says there is no need to return to the Earth for there is no reason to go back and die of old age. Ellis admits he was in love with Tempest Durand, and without her life has no meaning. Kenning says he will get Tempest and leaves. She comes into the room and Ellis can’t understand. Was she a stowaway all this time? No, she shows him the bandages. She was Kenning all this time, hiding behind her bandages and a rough voice. Two humans remain to repopulate the earth.

In The Early Williamson, Jack explains: ‘The Plutonian Terror’ is included here as the first of the ‘weird-scientific’ short stories I did for Weird Tales. Though I can find no file card, it must have been written in 1932. It was printed in the issue for October 1933, following the last part of Golden Blood. At 9,000 words, it brought $90.

The not-very-believable twist at the end of the story seems to suggest that I wasn’t yet fully aware of women, but at least I had learned to dance. With my brother and sisters I was attending Saturday night country dances, and I had bought a spring-powered phonograph. There was one fast breakdown – I can’t recall the name of the tune — that I played again and again to get the feel of ‘the music of madness’ for the story.

The plot idea comes from M. P. Shield. I don’t think I had yet read The Purple Cloud, but Ed Hamilton had told it to me when we were camped one night on a Mississippi sandbar, and my imagination has always been haunted by his terrifying vision of one man left all alone in a dead world.

The Plutonian terror is actually terror of progress — that’s what strikes me now when I reread the story. Perhaps I had caught that dread from Wells, whose early fiction I was studying with a vast admiration. Certainly the story owes much to him. The giant brain, ‘the hideous consummation of organic evolution,’ is clearly borrowed from his First Men in the Moon, and its quick decay is a device from The War of the Worlds.”

Williamson’s portrayal of Pluto reminds me of H. P. Lovecraft’s Yuggoth in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (Weird Tales, August 1931). The Mi-Go or Fungi from Yuggoth live on the far planet and worship a dark elder being in a giant pit.

“The Plutonian Terror” did not get top vote in “The Eyrie”. Jack Darrow of Chicago disagreed: “… Jack Williamson leads off with his unusual novelette, the Plutonian Terror. It is different from anything he has yet written–the eery beginning of finding the earth depopulated–the trip to Pluto and the encounter with the Brain–the surprise ending. The tale easily deserved first place. I am disappointed you did not give it a cover illustration.”

“Invaders of the Ice World” (Weird Tales, January 1934) has Earth in its last days. The planet is cold and barren with a black red-rimmed sun hanging over it. The people of Earth have changed, seven feet tall with hairy bodies, they live in one city, Zen, which is maintained by radium-powered fires. But the radium is almost depleted. That is why Tro-Kar and his son, Fal-Kar have hidden themselves away in a remote tower to discover the power of atomic energy.

While Fal-Kar perfects the technology to create a new atomic sun, Tro-Kar watches the heavens for a new enemy has come. Cold-based frost creatures have left the Moon for Earth. In desperation, Tro-Kar sends his son to Zen to retrieve a radium cell powerful enough to start the new machine. Fal-Kar is happy to go for his love, Del-Ara is in Zen. As Fal-Kar’s ship flies to the city he sees the invaders, who send ice spears at him. He manages to evade them long enough to get to the city, which is held behind an energy screen. The attacks of cold make him weak and sleepy.

When Fal-Kar awakens the invaders are inside the city and the energy screen fails. Taking Del-Ara, he flies out of the city and sees it destroyed. Desperate to finish the work on the atomic sun, he returns, retrieves a cell but falters at the door. Del-Ara gets to the ship and burns away the invaders with the engines. They return to the tower, though it too has been attacked by the ice creatures.

Once inside they find Tro-Kar dead, his body mangled and frozen. But before he died he brought the ends of the power cables to the door. All Fal-Kar has to do is attached the radium cell. He does this as the ice creatures stab him with their spears. He awakens to sunshine and blue sky. They have succeeded and the new atomic sun has destroyed the invaders. He and Del-Ara will repopulate the green earth with their children.

Williamson’s vision of a dying earth is intriguing. His ice invaders are ruthless and alien. The Shiel theme of a new Adam and Eve appears for a second time. As Williamson admits, single and unmarried, he was thinking quite a bit about women at this time.

“Wizard’s Isle” (Weird Tales, June 1934) is quite a let-down after the last four stories. A Yellow Peril tale of a man named Jason Wade who has returned from China to discover his fiancee, Tonia Hope, has been kidnapped. Wade’s school friend, Gerald Travers and his wife have also disappeared. Wade has hired a P. I. to look into things but the man is quitting, for the name of Mr. Alexander has entered the picture. Known as Iskander, the Wizard of Life, the mystery man uses hoods like Jabez Head to remove threats to his secrecy. Rumors have it that Iskander has built something strange and unusual in the Arabian Peninsula. Wade doesn’t take the detective’s advice and keeps digging.

Two men jump him, cover his face with adhesive plaster and drive him to a boat and then to a plane. One attempt at escape fails and Wade is bound securely. When the men, Jabez Head and the giant ape of man, Hap Nino, remove his hood he sees where he is headed. A gigantic steel and glass vessel lying off the coast of some unknown land. Head answers all his questions with, “Wait until you see, Mr. Alexander.”

The plane lands on the deck of the glass island. wade is taken to see the master, Iskander, Wizard of Life. The stereotypical Asian genius is a master of genetics and cruel to no end. He shows Wade the girl Tonia, trapped in a glass cage in the floor. He also shows him Gerald Travers, his body that of a giant scorpion, his head still human and weeping. Iskander reveals he will do something similar to Tonia, making her the mother of the new human race.

Once Iskander learns that Wade is not working for the Government, he has his goons throw him overboard into the freezing waters. He is being slapped against the metal sides of the artificial island when he sees a drainage port. Opening the grill, he climbs back inside the ship, finding himself in a lush garden. It is Iskander’s research lab, where he keeps different genetic mutations. Wade finds the madman and two Chinese henchmen hunting something in the thick foliage. They are tracking a gigantic centipede.

Wade uses the creature’s attack as a distraction and manages to get one henchman eaten by the beast then get his hands around Iskander’s throat. The third man knocks him out. Wade wakes up in a cell where the Wizard of Life tells him again of his evil plans and how he will change Wade into a monster like Travers. Four men come and take him to the ray chamber. wade sees Travers there and makes his move. He calls out to the mutated man to fight the gunmen.

Wade and the monster take out the guards, though one escapes. Armed with a revolver, Wade leads the monster to the deck, killing men as they go. The baddies lock themselves behind a door, but Wade shoots his way in, killing Head and Nino. The scorpion monster stabs its stinger into Iskander even as it dies from its wounds. the Wizard of Life says, “You win Mr. Wade and lose…” having spun the brass wheel in the room. What terrible thing has the madman done?

Williamson ends the story in re-cap to the Captain of the ship that rescues two people: Jason wade and Tonia Hope. When Iskander turned the wheel it opened valves that flooded the island. Wade shoots his way to Tonia’s cell, rescues her, then the pair shoot more men to get an airplane and fly away. The battleship was on route in the Pacific because Iskander had used his secret weapon to destroy two Danish ships. Wade gives all the credit to Gerry Travers, who gave his life to kill Iskander. Wade tells the Captain to call Tonia’s aunt and tell her her niece is free. Tonia corrects him: tell her I am attached and soon to be married.

I was struck strongly by the familiar scene of the weird island with the Oriental scientific genius. Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, movie or book. 1957. Jack Williamson wrote this scene twenty-four years before Fleming. Then I remembered who inspired Fleming — Sax Rohmer. Obviously he inspired Williamson too, just earlier as he did with Seabury Quinn in “The Isle of Missing Ships”.

Earl Alvin Perry, of Rockdale, Texas wrote:”…Jack Williamson kept up the reputation he gained by writing Golden Blood, when he turned out Wizard’s Isle. The story gripped my interest from beginning to end; Jack, who seems to send hi best stories to WT, outdid himself.”

Mr. Perry is entitled to his opinion but I’m not sure critical opinion would agree with him. Williamson, as we will see in his next story, sent stories to Weird Tales when he couldn’t place them elsewhere. Strange Tales, which paid twice as much on acceptance, got first pick. A businessman as well as a writer, this only made sense.

“The Ruler of Fate” (Weird Tales, April-June 1936) was a three-part serial that opens with secretary and boss talking after a terrible accident. Kane Montel, known as Monty, is the lone survivor of the crash of the company’s experimental space rocket. Shiela Hall makes her feelings pretty clear about Monty, though he seems pretty clueless. Kane is ready to quit his life-long quest for space travel when his friend, Senator Martin Grenfell, convinces Kane he has to keep trying. Grenfell talks (as Jack Williamson talks through him) on the insanity of war. Kane’s father has given the world atomic energy and it looks like the next war will be an atomic one. (Remember this is 1936! And critics sneered at SF as “escapist trash”.)

To make matters worse, Grenfell gets a call. The government is taking over Kane’s project in two days, to turn his spaceship into a bomber. This spurs Monty and Shiela, who insists on coming now that all the qualified people are dead, to patch up the ship and be gone for the Moon before the army can steal their ship, The Spirit of Man.

The pair get to the moon after three days. They land in the crater Tycho and discover a strange energy ray. While examining it, another spaceship appears and lands near The Spirit of Man. There is no escape and allow themselves to be taken. Once inside they see who these strange men are who have captured them. They re taken to a vast underground base. A tall, dark man named Vethlo explains that they are prisoners of his master, Aru, the Ruler of Fate. To demonstrate Aru’s power, Vethlo shows them the machine that rules the world. The ray force they saw on the moon’s surface is the beam that scans the earth continuously, knowing all.

B. M. Reynolds wrote in “The Eyrie”: “The Ruler of Fate by Jack Williamson got off to a good start and I know the succeeding installments will be equally fine.”

Vethlo continues the demo by showing Shiela and her dead father three years previously. Time is nothing to Aru. Then Vethlo shows them Senator Grenfell trying to convince people not to go to war. The tall man makes Shiela touch Grenfell with a wand. A gun shot rings out and the man is killed. The machine manipulated a man to fire on the senator.

Vethlo takes the pair to see Aru, who turns out to be a bloated, flabby individual with evil eyes. Aru has a console for the machine as well and uses it to show Kane and Shiela the bombing of San Francisco. He now reveals what his plans are. Aru is playing a game in which he will destroy the Earth. Aru has been sabotaging Montel’s spaceship tests, only allowing success when Shiela was allowed to come to the Moon. After the world is destroyed by nuclear war, Aru wishes to begin a new game against Shiela. Kane is to be killed or sent back to earth in his spaceship. Kane waits for the right moment, kicks out Vethlo’s knee and tries to strangle Aru. The fat man waves a hand and wall of energy stops him, blasting him with stronger and stronger pain.

A female voice rings out, “Stop! Kane Montel must not die!” Kane is released from the killer energy. A beautiful golden-skinned woman inside a strange floating gem appears. It is Athonee, Aru’s mother. She presses a button on her ring and the gem disappears and she is standing there with the others. She explains that she created the machine as the last member of her kind (a race Kane thinks is human but not homo sapiens.) She did have a fling with someone and bear Aru, her spoiled boy child.

Aru wants to play the new game first. Athonee reveals that there is a single part of the machine that secret from Aru, and Atonee will reveal it if Shiela loses. Aru gives her two choices. if she choose to stay with Aru, be his mate, Kane can return to Earth and Shiela can make his life long and wonderful. The other choice is the two will go in The Spirit of Man, have three days together but will crash land on Earth. Neither will die but they will separated and never see each other again, despite a terrible life in the post atomic war world, always searching for the other.

Gertrude Hemken wrote in about Part 2: “The Ruler of Fate is good reading, but there too much suspense to my taste–the poor hero and shero [sic] are given no chance to fight.” Gertrude is onto something here….

Shiela decides to return to Earth. Aru has lost. But Athonee changes the game by whisking the two earthlings to her subterranean home. Here she tells the visitors her history, how she escaped the destruction on earth (that also destroyed Atlantis) with a lover and another man. The other man grew jealous and killed the lover. Athonee killed the other man, leaving her alone. She later brought Vethlo to the Moon and sired Aru. She then shows Kane and Shiela the secret she has withheld from her son, a vase. If the vase is destroyed Aru will die. Before Kane can break it, she explains that whoever kills Aru will also die.

Aru and his soldiers come at last. Aru is ready to kill his mother, when he taunts her and about the vase and destroys it. This spurs Vethlo to shoot Aru with a blaster, killing him and causing Vethlo’s death as well. The two earthlings are now free to return to Earth with Athonee’s blessing. The death of Grenfell will not happen nor the nuclear war. The machine will be used only for the improvement of humankind.

Williamson must have been having war fears during 1936. This story clearly sets his opinion on the stupidity of armed conflicts and the answer to the age-old problem, space travel. Get the human race into space and it no longer need waste its time fighting over wealth. How sadly ironic it must have been for Jack to see World War II end with two nuclear bombs.

Gertrude Hemken again: “The Ruler of Fate ended to my satisfaction. Narsty [sic] Aru was killed dead and lovely Athonee was left to control her machine of destiny with kindness to the man of Earth. And I suppose the hero and heroine got married and lived happily ever after.” I think her first observation is truer. The story lacks involvement because the humans are powerless to do much but suffer. The only action is Shiela’s choice. Athonee congratulates her for that act of bravery but it isn’t enough to keep the story engaging. None of the installments were voted Best in the Issue.

Of interest to me are recent television shows that have featured incredible machines (not quite as powerful as Williamson’s) on Lost and Person of Interest even Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report. The idea of a technology that can rule fate is still with us, along with its questions about morality and consequence.

“The Mark of the Monster” (Weird Tales, May 1937) was a Shudder Pulp story that got rejected by magazines like Terror Tales. It ended up in Weird Tales. I wrote a whole piece on it, so go here.

Jack spoke of it: “I’ve had stories published that really shouldn’t have been published, certainly. Back in those hard times, I wanted to write for the horror magazines, which were new and paying good rates. I wrote “The Mark of the Monster”, which was too heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. It was rejected by the horror magazines. I sent it to Weird Tales. They accepted it and published it with a cover picture. The readers panned it heavily. I wish that it had never seen the light of day.”

“Dreadful Sleep” (Weird Tales, March-May 1938) is another three-parter, this time revolving around Antarctica. The narrator, Ronald Dunbar, begins by saying he will explain the “Time Fault”, a jolt in time when the Earth lost six months in an instant. Dunbar is approached by his friend Dr. Aston Harding to fly back to Antarctica even though the season is over and winter fast approaching. The reason is because inventor Meriden Bell has created an atomic engine that can melt the polar ice cap. (Harding needs a world wide success because his last invention had been stolen by his assistant, Mawson Kroll, and used to kill millions. Harding was blamed until Kroll was discovered. The man was tried and executed.)

Dunbar refuses until Harding’s wife, Jerry, an old friend, asks. She explains that Harding hasn’t been well for two years, his pleasant personality changed, his memory full of holes. The group of friends have formed a syndicate that will reap the rewards of the new real estate uncovered from the ice. Dunbar will be given a share if he flies them all to the South Pole in his plane, the Austral Queen.

The night before his departure, Dunbar has a strange dream. A weird, golden creature appears floating in his bedroom:

“My incredible visitor was floating a yard off the floor. It shone with a pale light of its own, so that I had no need of the electrics. A brief high note came from it again, keen with lonely longing, and somehow telling me not to be afraid.

A being being conception, supernal! An exquisite rosy shell, floating upright, flushed with a living light. Its fluted spirals tapered to a point, below. Its gleaming lips, flared out like a vase of pearl, held the bust of an elfin woman.”

This is Maru-Mora, who pulls Dunbar’s soul from his body and flies to the South Pole. She takes him to a vast purple, pylon, like an amethyst castle. Here is meets Karalee, the most beautiful girl Ron has ever met. The two instantly fall for each other. Dunbar promises her that all of him will soon be at the pole. Maru-Mora, through Karalee as translator, tells Dunbar he must not come, must no unfreeze the South Pole. Buried, frozen in the ice are terrible creatures. She shows one of them to the man Those That Sleep:

“I shuddered at the sight of that monstrous thing. It stood upright on a cragged boulder, and it did not move. the body of it was black, covered with great scales, a swollen elongated thing shaped like an immense barrel. It stood upon three black tentacular limbs, whose extremities had coiled like might serpent to grasp the granite.

Head, it had none. But the bulging upper end of the body was broken with a great sharp triangular projection, which looked like a hideous snout. Three scaled triangular flaps, just about its equatorial belt, might, I thought cover strange organs of sense.

This creature was utterly horrifying, in a sense I can hardly define. Its horror held nothing familiar…”

Maru-Mora takes the couple down below the ice next to see the spaceship the creatures she calls Tharshoon, came in. They are evil beings that Maru-Mora describes as being from an unknown ‘beyond”. Her race fought these Lovecraftian monsters and only she survived. By freezing the entire South Polar continent, she trapped them. They are not dead but waiting. She is their only guardian. Done with the warnings, Maru-Mora takes Karalee back to her body then wants to do the same for Dunbar. he wants to remain and painfully wakes up in his own body.

The flyer dismisses the entire dream the next day. The expedition flies off for Antarctica, fighting the bitter winter winds. During the flight Dunbar feels a weird shift, a premonition that Jerry Harding is not going survive the trip. Looking at her, he sees that she too is experiencing this weird feeling. She asks Ron to watch out for her husband.

The explorers arrive, build a base camp and beginning assembling the tower for the atomic device. All the time, Dunbar denies the dream he had with Maru-Mora. One night he awakes to hear singing. He goes outside. The air is still and the sky bright with the aurora. He sees Maru-Mora and Karalee. She is being followed by a man. When Ron returns inside he learns Bell is not in his bed. The golden siren has lured him to his death.

Dunbar goes after Bell. He finds his flashlight with a note. Bell has been visited by Maru-Mora three times and wants only to be with her. A snowstorm threatens but Dunbar presses on, finding Bell’s dead body. The atomic device can now not be completed.

Dunbar tries to make it back to camp but gets lost. He discovers a ruined plane, thinking it is his Austral Queen but it isn’t! It is a plane from 1939. (The story supposedly takes place in 1960.) Dunbar finds the diary of the pilot, Wilber Lee. He and his pregnant wife had been lost flying over the pole. They find one of the Tharshoon near by. In fact, it was spotting the monster that had caused them to crash. Maru-Mora takes Enlida Lee and Wilbur goes in search for her, no doubt to his death.

Leaving the wreck, Dunbar tries to find the camp again. Instead he finds Jerry Harding, badly beaten and dying. She revives to tell him that it was not her husband but Mawson Kroll who attacked her. Jerry knows the truth when she sees him without his dark glasses that he always wears. His eyes are not blue but black. Mawson admits it was actually Harding who was executed. For the last two years, Kroll has been pretending to be Harding. This explains the personality change, lapses in memory and the glasses.

Kroll tells Jerry how it was done. The Asian power he had given the deadly virus to had doctors who could transfer brains. Kroll and Harding had switched brains. Harding’s brain was surgically impaired so he could never tell anyone what had happened. Kroll beats her savagely. While lying on the floor she overhears Veering, Kroll’s lackey explain he has figured out how to remove the stasis lock on the Tharshoon. He also can figure out the atomic device of Bell.

Jerry dies in the snow. Dunbar promises her he will kill the thing that had pretended to be her husband. To do this, Ron decides to return to the broken airplane where an old rifle lie. On the way he encounters Kroll and his willing stooge Veering. When Dunbar reveals himself, they fire upon him. He falls down a ten foo crevasse. The two men leave him for dead. Kroll crows about possessing the atomic engine and the alien creatures, and how he will destroy all mankind. Dunbar returns to the Enlida Lee but the plane is gone. So is the black monster frozen nearby. The creature appears, flying above him. Using a green ray from its eye, the monster melts a snowbank, trying to find him. It flies away to its master, Kroll.

Karalee saves Ron Dunbar from freezing to death. She is on a mission from Maru-Mora. She has a fantastic treasure taken the vaults of the Maru’s race to give to Kroll in exchange for re-freezing the Antarctic and the Tharshoon. Karalee gives Ron a gift, a golden bracelet, an insists he never take it off. Ron gives her a gift too, telling her about the plane that her parents had flown in and telling her about the “Flying Lees”. He asks her to return to civilization with him when all this is over.

The couple find Kroll, make the offer. Kroll refuses and sicks the Tharshoon on them. Dunbar takes a sword from the treasure chest and fights back. Veering the assistant freezes them with a stasis beam. Ron’s mind wakes to see his plane, the treasure and Karalee packed up and taken to the Tharshoon ship. Ron is left behind as a statue to memorialize the dying human race but the bracelet revives him after they leave. Karalee’s gift is an anti-stasis device from Maru-Mora.

There is a long section describing Ron’s journey through the stasis-locked world, where he slides over the ocean, as hard as ice. He tries to revive people but can’t. He eventually gets to Argentina then New York City. This part is wonderfully Wellsian (or I prefer to think of it as Wyndhamian). He gets back to his old home city to see the Tharshoon gathering humans for food for their brood. He succeeds sneaking near the ship and in turning Veering to his way but Kroll discovers them and Veering is fed to the Tharshoon.

Ron and Karalee are placed in a grub chamber. The worm baby comes to eat them but with the help of Meridan Bell’s spirit, Ron kills the grub. They escape the mound, hunted by the angry Tharshoon, and head for Bell’s old lab. There Ron mixes a brown liquid while Kroll and the aliens melt away the door. Ron throws the liquid at Kroll just in time as he is frozen in stasis. It is an new virus that eats Kroll and poisons the Tharshoon with him. It takes the plague back to the ship, killing all of the aliens once out in space. Anyone is stasis is not affected. Bell and Maru-Mora unfreeze everybody and the world wakes to find six months has passed.

Any reader of Astounding will instantly recognize the setting of this novel. It is almost as if A. Merritt had written H. P. Lovecraft’s classic “At the Mountains of Madness” (February-April 1936). The Tharshoon resemble the Old Ones in that they are eldritch, barrel-shaped and headless. There can be no doubt that Jack Williamson had been influenced by this story. It’s almost like he had said, “What if Lovecraft had put girls in it?”

The May 1938 issue’s letters had a piece called “A Lone Cry” where Donald A. Allgeier of Licking, Missouri wrote: “…I give first place to Dreadful Sleep. Jack Williamson has done it again. I agree with those who compare his style to Merritt’s. They are similar, but Williamson is a splendid author in his own right. This seems to me to be as great a story as the now almost legendary Golden Blood.”

That “Lone Cry” suggests not many others wrote in for more Merritt-esque pastiches. Williamson was probably not interested in pursuing more as this was his last story for Weird Tales. Perhaps the only story that even comes close to these WT pieces is The Reign of Wizardry for John W. Campbell’s Unknown (March 1940). Campbell’s editorial philosophy was closer to Williamson, with the belief that Fantasy stories should be closer to Science Fiction.

Unlike many Weird Tales writers, Jack Williamson had more than one string on his bow. He started with Hugo Gernsback, writing Merritt-inspired stories but quickly moved onto Harry Bates and then Orlin F. Tremaine’s Astounding where he produced space opera classics like The Legion of Space. So by 1938, Williamson was perfectly positioned to join John W. Campbell’s Astounding and its new definition of what speculative fiction could be. With “Crucible of Power” (Astounding Science Fiction, February 1939) Williamson was done with Weird Tales and several other low-paying magazines. He would go on to write such SF and Fantasy masterpieces as Darker Than You Think (Unknown, December 1940) and “With Folded Hands” (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1947). His legacy, if his collected work are any indication, does not include these early Weird Tales stories. And that is nothing short of a shame.