Space Westerns: Northwest Smith of Earth

Space Westerns really began with Northwest Smith of Earth. That adventuring spaceman is the prototype that gave us Han Solo. And to think he we was created when Catherine Lucille Moore was working as a secretary and saw a letter from a “N. W. Smith”. From such moments are great stories carved. His best buddy, Yarol the Venusian got his name from an anagram of the brand of typewriter she used: a Royal.

The Northwest Smith stories, like her Jirel of Joiry Sword & Sorcery tales, appeared in Weird Tales. Once again, when Golden Agers turn up their noses at the Unique Magazine, they are denying a big part of Science Fiction history. Not only did Edmond Hamilton invent Space Opera with his Interstellar Patrol stories here, but works by Nictyzin Dyalhis, J. Schlossal, Ray Cummings and others helped build an audience for an all-Science Fiction magazine like Amazing Stories. The Northwest Smith stories, coming a little later, might garner a small amount more applause.

SF bigots aside, C. L. Moore was an important writer of Science Fiction. The best woman Fantasy writer since Francis Stevens, she would move to other magazines with and without her husband, Henry Kuttner. She penned classics like “The Bright Illusion” (Astounding Stories, October 1934) and “No Woman Born” (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1944) on her own, and was half of the brilliant team that published under the name “Lewis Padgett” with “The Twonky”, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and many others. She and Henry together published under other pseudonyms like Keith Hammond and Lawrence O’Donnell.

Before all that, there was A. Merritt. Despite the cowboy hero aspects of Northwest Smith, Moore’s biggest influence in these first years of her career wasn’t the Western Pulps but Abraham Merritt (1884-1943). His work in the Soft weeklies like Argosy inspired many writers such as Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton. Catherine would later get to write a round robin with Merritt called “The Challenge From Beyond” (Fantasy Magazine, September 1939) with H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long as well. C. L. Moore would get to go first, with A. Merritt following her.

A. Merritt’s style has been commented upon. I might call it “fruitcaky” to steal an adjective from Robertson Davies. In A Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction (1979), Baird Searles, Martin Last, Beth Meacham and Michael Franklin say:

Abraham Merritt’s works seem to leave no one neutral. The lush, art-noveau prose and classic adventure plots of his epitomal “scientific romances” are hard to take for certain modern readers, especially those of the nuts and bolts school of science fiction, but the rise of the romantic strain in s-f in the past decade has won him a whole new host of admirers. His influence cannot be ignored; like his contemporary, Edgar Rice Burroughs, he is one of the granddaddies of American science fiction.

The authors mention “the romantic strain in s-f”. That perfectly denotes C. L. Moore and her work here. These are “romantic” tales both in the sense of “love affairs” and in the older way, “fantastic adventure”. 1930s Weird Tales could still embrace this older way of story telling that later SF magazines (especially under John W. Campbell) would not. (That being said, she still sold him “No Woman Born” a very romantic story. That’s just how good she was!)

It’s time to meet Northwest. In “Black Thirst” he is described thus:

For an instant the light held him— lounging against the wall in his spaceman’s leather, the burns upon it, the tatters, ray-gun in its holster low on his thigh, and the brown scarred face turned to hers, eyes the colourless colour of pale steel narrowed to the glare. It was a typical face. It belonged here, on the waterfront, in these dark and dangerous streets. It belonged to the type that frequents such places, those lawless men who ride the spaceways and live by the rule of the ray-gun, recklessly, warily outside the Patrol’s jurisdiction.

That is a hellava cowboy moment, just as it could be a private detective moment. These character types, along with the space adventurer and the barbarian, were all cut from the same cloth. They are all American archetypes. They were all Pulp heroes.

His most famous story is without doubt the first, “Shambleau”. This storty would be reprinted countless times, and not just in 1970s paperbacks. The plot is pretty simple. Smith rescues a woman about to be killed by a Martian mob. He takes her back to his place and she does what vampires do. Later Yarol shows up and kills her, saving his friend. Most of the stories to follow feature similarly deadly females.

“Shambleau” (Weird Tales, November 1933)

“Black Thirst” (Weird Tales, April 1934)

“Scarlet Dream” (Weird Tales, May 1934)

“Dust of the Gods” (Weird Tales, August 1934)

“Julhi” (Weird Tales, March 1935)

“Nymph of Darkness” (with Forrest J. Ackerman) (Fantasy Magazine, April 1935) (reprinted in Weird Tales, December 1939)

“The Cold Gray God” (Weird Tales, October 1935)

“Yvala” (Weird Tales, February 1936)

“Lost Paradise” (Weird Tales, July 1936)

“The Tree of Life” (Weird Tales, October 1936)

“Quest of the Starstone” (Weird Tales, November 1937) (with Henry Kuttner)

“Werewoman” (Leaves, Winter 1938) (reprinted in Avon Fantasy Reader

“Song in a Minor Key” (Scienti-Snaps, February 1940) (reprinted in Fantastic Universe, January 1957)

In my piece on Space Western comics from Charlton, I addressed how Space Westerns are really two different types of fiction. There is the story set on Earth with cowboys that meet with aliens. These I call Space Westerns. The other breed is the story that feels like a Western but is set in space. I have named these “Spaceways” and that term comes directly from C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories. The galactic bars and shady streets where dark things happen, she called the Spaceways. A little later, by the time Leigh Brackett would bring her hero, Eric John Stark, into being in Planet Stories, the intergalactic milieu of the Spaceways was well established. Decades later, George Lucas would invite us all to have seat at a bar in Mos Eisley with a smuggler named Han and his hairy sidekick, Chewie. For millions, this was a revelation. For C. L. Moore readers, it was a homecoming.