Serpents of the Air

Technology can date a story faster than Captain Kirk can hook up with a Venusian barmaid. One day the story is plausible, the next… A good example of this is a small number of stories that were popular at the turn of the century and up to the 1930s. These tales asked the question: what will we find when we are able to penetrate the upper reaches of the atmosphere? Like all good adventure/SF writers the obvious answer is… Monsters! This entire line of storytelling came to an end on May 27, 1931 when Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer rose to 15, 781 meters (52, 077 feet) in a pressurized hot air balloon. Airplanes were reaching 30,000 ft in the 1920s so well before WWII the idea of creatures living in the lower atmosphere was ridiculous.

Two Classics

I always thought it was Arthur Conan Doyle who came up with the idea of the air serpent but this is not true. Will A. Page wrote “The Air Serpent” (The Red Book Magazine, April 1911). Doyle wrote “The Horror of the Heights” (The Strand Magazine, November 1913). Of the two stories Doyle’s is far superior, being both shorter (Page’s drags on for pages and pages before even getting into the air) and is more focused on the creature. Both authors tried to extrapolate what an aerial life form would be like. Page creates a flying snake while Doyle feels the flesh of the creature must be more gelatinous. Page says it does not look like a bird while Doyle gives it a vulture-like beak. Both authors feel the snake would need large eyes.

Page’s description:

The monster-or air serpent, for so I must call it-seemed to be about ninety or a hundred feet in length. Its physical structure seemed a cross between a bat and a snake. There were undulating movements as it slowly drifted, together with flapping of the twenty or thirty batlike wings which projected from its sides. The head was enormous, and it was not the head of a bird. Two great eyes, approximately a foot in diameter each, glared and blinked over a cavernous maw which opened and closed spasmodically as the creature breathed. This much we saw, and then as the swift tri-plane shot by almost under the creature’s startled eyes, I felt a sudden blast of hot air which made the tri-plane quiver and tremble for a moment. Then we had passed the creature and had sped forth into the darkness, for the moonlight was very faint.

Doyle’s:
“But a more terrible experience was in store for me. Floating downwards from a great height there came a purplish patch of vapour, small as I saw it first, but rapidly enlarging as it approached me, until it appeared to be hundreds of square feet in size. Though fashioned of some transparent, jelly-like substance, it was none the less of much more definite outline and solid consistence than anything which I had seen before. There were more traces, too, of a physical organization, especially two vast, shadowy, circular plates upon either side, which may have been eyes, and a perfectly solid white projection between them which was as curved and cruel as the beak of a vulture.

“The whole aspect of this monster was formidable and threatening, and it kept changing its colour from a very light mauve to a dark, angry purple so thick that it cast a shadow as it drifted between my monoplane and the sun. On the upper curve of its huge body there were three great projections which I can only describe as enormous bubbles, and I was convinced as I looked at them that they were charged with some extremely light gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air. The creature moved swiftly along, keeping pace easily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce. Its method of progression-done so swiftly that it was not easy to follow-was to throw out a long, glutinous streamer in front of it, which in turn seemed to draw forward the rest of the writhing body. So elastic and gelatinous was it that never for two successive minutes was it the same shape, and yet each change made it more threatening and loathsome than the last.

“I knew that it meant mischief. Every purple flush of its hideous body told me so. The vague, goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred. I dipped the nose of my monoplane downwards to escape it. As I did so, as quick as a flash there shot out a long tentacle from this mass of floating blubber, and it fell as light and sinuous as a whip-lash across the front of my machine. There was a loud hiss as it lay for a moment across the hot engine, and it whisked itself into the air again, while the huge, flat body drew itself together as if in sudden pain. I dipped to a vol-piqué, but again a tentacle fell over the monoplane and was shorn off by the propeller as easily as it might have cut through a smoke wreath. A long, gliding, sticky, serpent-like coil came from behind and caught me round the waist, dragging me out of the fuselage. I tore at it, my fingers sinking into the smooth, glue-like surface, and for an instant I disengaged myself, but only to be caught round the boot by another coil, which gave me a jerk that tilted me almost on to my back.

Pulp Terrors

Hugo Gernsback provided an entire sky ecosystem in the first Amazing Stories Quarterly (Winter 1928) in “The Terrors of the Upper Air” by Frank Orndorff. In this tale, the author is working from A. Conan Doyle’s lead, building floating clouds of air islands, populated by small bat-like, crocodile-sized, octopus shaped with floating balloons and snake-sized flying creatures, all beasts that are descended from Conan Doyle’s beaked sky serpent. The two explorers this time are two thieves that have stolen half a million dollars before coming to the State Fair to break the altitude record for an airplane. They take oxygen tanks and thick coats and narrate the entire event over radio. The State Farm visitors can hear each new marvel as it happens.

Only the Great Detective, Pemberton (another Doyle touch), has the wits to see the men’s demise as a clever ploy to escape capture. Orndorff negates his fantastic vision “…with a typical O. Henry ending”, as Gernsback puts it.

 

Charles W. Diffin was an early SF writer for the Clayton Astounding. Much of his work was inspired by H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. In “Dark Moon” (Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May 1931) Diffin wrote his story shortly after the Piccard-Kipfler balloon flight and so he knows he must go farther out into space to make his air serpents plausible. This he does by going beyond the Heaviside Layer in the ionosphere.

Diffin’s version:
THE AIR WAS alive with darting forms. Harkness saw them plainly now-great trailing streamers of speed that shot downward from the heights. The sun caught them in their flight to make iridescent rainbow hues that would have been beautiful but for the hideous heads, the sucker-discs that lined the bodies and the one great disc that cupped on the end of each thrusting snout. And beneath those that fell from on high was a cluster of the same sinister, writhing shapes which clung to a speeding ship that rolled and swung vainly in an effort to shake them off.

The coiling, slashing serpent-forms had fastened to the doomed ship. Their thrashing bodies streamed out behind it. They made a cluster of flashing color whose center point was a tiny airship, a speedster, a gay little craft. And her sides shone red as blood-red as they had shone on the grassy lawn of an old chateau near far-off Vienna.

“Death in the Stratosphere” by Henry J. Kostkos (Amazing Stories, August 1937) features an aerial monster composed of gelatinous material (ala Doyle). When one man tries to touch it, it practically eats his arm off Lovecraft style. Also in the Doyle fashion, the eyes… Kostkos presents the sheer size of his serpent thusly (The artist, Leo Morey, chose that scene for his illustration):

Pressing against the thick glass was a huge eye, fully a yard in diameter, pulsating with red and blue fires that seemed to consume it! And encasing the eye was an indefinable shape, a mass of irridescent, moving, writhing gelatine. The same substance as that which clung to the landing gear of No. 1!

The mystery of the missing crew and passengers heats up when the daughter of the airline goes missing. Of course there is a brave young man to help the father defeat the terror of the airways.

Late to the Party

Sometimes we get a very late throwback to an old idea, just for fun. That story is “Prisoners of the Sky” by C. C. MacApp that appeared in IF, February 1966. There is no possibility of MacApp suggesting that aerial serpents are real on Earth. Instead he gives us an alien world where humans use zeppelins as their many vehicle but winged aliens pose a threat.

The quadrala is described:

The creature, circling the Gaffer, came into view. It was a quadrala, all right — close to sixty feet long, its snake-like head nearly as big as a man. Its two pairs of wings — one about one third of the way back along its body, the other, two-thirds back — flapped alternately, so that is long body undulated. The skin was a crazy-quilt pattern of light and dark green — out of place here; but a common jungle pattern. The eight legs looked insignificant. But any pair of them could jerk a man into the air. It followed Gaffer up, uttering its harsh croaks, trying to decide whether the moving objects in the basket were edible parasites of some kind or whether they were part of the whole strange object — which was too big to attack.

Conclusion

It would be ridiculous to say that readers in the 1930s thought space travel a possibility (especially within the next 30 years). Science would catch up to fiction and then surpass it. Probes such as Sputnik and later space craft would prove Diffin’s ideas outmoded. (Very likely most serious-minded fans found them so back in 1931.) The small sub-genre of air serpent stories blossomed briefly, never really went too far, then became obsolete. Science is a bitch. I wonder what our great-grandkids will be laughing at in time?