Jack Williamson’s “The Moon Era” is a wonderful adventure in the best of the Wonder Stories tradition. Wellsian in tone, we follow Stephen Conway to the Moon of the past, not the lifeless rock of today. The fiction of Williamson’s idol, A. Merritt, will also have an effect on this story. Stephen travels in a ship invented by his rich uncle. The young teacher will inherit the family fortune if he goes to the Moon. He takes the week-long trip without difficulty. Once there, he encounters strange trees, weird creatures, both good and bad.
As the reader of 1932 who owned my scanned copy of this tale wrote in pencil on the title page: “A moon story that is extremely interesting. Jack always makes’em that way. R. M.” I couldn’t agree more ninety years later.
“The Moon Era” appeared in Wonder Stories, February 1932. It is one of Williamson’s excellent early tales, with a man going to the Moon in a spaceship that is also a time machine, so he arrives there in the remote past. That Moon is not a barren, airless place but covered with jungle and inhabited by strange flora and fauna.
The Balloon Creatures
Stephen unwisely leaves the craft and goes for a walk on the Moon, where he finds a jungle with floating balloons, which he assumes are devices used by people. The truth becomes clear once he is grabbed by one of the things:
The whole balloon was a living thing!
I saw its two black and terrible eyes, aflame with hot evil, staring at me from many bright facets. The black limbs I had seen were its legs, growing in a cluster at the bottom of its body—now furiously busy coiling up the cable that it had spun, spider-like, to catch me. I saw long jaws waiting, black and hideously fanged, drooling foul saliva. And a rapier-thin pointed snout, that must be meant for piercing, sucking body juices.
The huge purple sphere was a thin-walled, muscular sac, which must have been filled with some light gas, probably hydrogen, generated in the body of the creature. The amazing being floated above the jungle, out of harm’s way, riding free on the wind, or anchored with its red web, lassoing its prey and hauling it up to feast hideously in the air.
For a moment I was petrified, dazed and helpless with the new horror of that thin snout, with black-fanged jaws behind it.
Fortunately, Stephen has brought a pistol with him. He shoots the balloon animal six times, killing it. The dead creature carries him far from his ship, dropping him in a jungle filled with nasty thorns. Williamson would recycle the balloon creature idea for his first big hit, The Legion of Space in 1934. The villains of that novel are the Medusa, which remind me of the Balloon creatures. The Medusa attack from the air with tentacles as well. Williamson would use the balloon creature idea for a third time forty-six years later for Harlan Ellsion’s shared world, Medea. Jack wrote “Farside Station” for that collection, reprinting it in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1978. The Medean version is not predatory.
Williamson did not create the first balloon critters though. Roger Wulfres had “The Air-Plant Men” over a year earlier (Wonder Stories, December 1930). Jack was a Wonder Stories reader, so he would have most likely read this.
The Mother
Escaping the thorns, Stephen passes out to find a strange, warbling creature standing over him. The creature uses its powers to heal Stephen’s wounds. This new alien looks like a furry eel with small wing-like appendages. The creature speaks through a form of telepathy. It is called Mother, and she is the last of her race. Her enemies have hunted down and killed all of her kind. She is the last hope as she carries the eggs of her race. She is trying to get to the shallow sea and escape the Eternal Ones (more on them later).
The Mother is one of the Merrittesque elements of this story. Abraham Merritt had the Snake Mother in The Face in the Abyss. (Reprinted in Fantastic Novels, November 1940) The Mother is descended from that ancient survival. E. F. Bleiler points out, quite correctly in Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years (1998) that Stanley G. Weinbaum gets credit for creating the first sympathetic alien in Science Fiction. “The Moon Era” proves this to be incorrect, for Jack Williamson has done it here in almost two years earlier. (I believe R. F. Starzl and John Wyndham both did it earlier, too.)
But as Merritt inspired Williamson, The Mother-Thing from Have Space Suit Will Travel (Fantasy & Science Fiction, August September October 1958) by Robert A. Heinlein must surely have been inspired by Jack’s Mother.
Compare these two descriptions:
A small head, not much larger than my fist. A tiny mouth, with curved lips full and red as a woman’s. And large eyes, dark and intelligent. They were deeply violet, almost luminous. Somehow they looked human, perhaps only because they mirrored the human qualities of curiosity and pity.
Aside from red mouth and dark eyes, the head had no human features. Golden down covered it. On the crown was a plume or crest of brilliant blue. But strange as it was, it possessed a certain beauty. A beauty of exquisite proportion, of smooth curves.
Curious wing-like appendages or mantles grew from the sides of the sleek, golden body, just below the head. Now they were stiffened, extended as if for flight. They were very white, of thin soft membrane. Their snowy surfaces were finely veined with scarlet.
Other than these white, membranous mantles, the creature had no limbs. Slim, long, pliant body, covered with golden fur. Small, delicate head, with red mouth and warm dark eyes, crested with blue. And delicate wings thrust out from its sides.
Heinlein’s alien:
An unprejudiced mind (which mine wasn’t) would have said that this monster was rather pretty. It was small, not more than half my size, and its curves were graceful, not as a girl is but more like a leopard, although it wasn’t shaped like either one. I couldn’t grasp its shape—I didn’t have any pattern to fit it to; it wouldn’t add up.
But I could see that it was hurt. Its body was quivering like a frightened rabbit. It had enormous eyes, open but milky and featureless, as if nictitating membranes were across them. What appeared to be its mouth—
John C. Wright picked up on this too in this post. He extends the motif from Heinlein to Spielberg’s E. T. Alien, big eyes, magical powers, I suppose he is right.
The Red Rollers
The Red Roller is a predator that lives in the thorn woods, where they make tunnels through the nasty spines. They are vampiric creatures that suck the body fluids from their victims. The Red Roller is not susceptible to Mother’s telepathic powers.
A sphere of bright crimson. Nearly five feet in diameter. It rolled along, following the way we had come…
Now the scarlet globe was no more than fifty yards away. I could distinguish the individual scales of its armor, looking like plates of horn covered with ruby lacquer. No limbs or external appendages were visible then. But I saw dark ovals upon the shell, appearing at the top and seeming to drop down, as the thing rolled…
Until it stopped, it had presented a sphere of unbroken surface. But suddenly six long, glistening black tentacles reached out of it, one from each of the black ovals I had seen evenly spaced about the red shell. They were a dozen feet long, slender, covered with thin black skin corrugated with innumerable wrinkles, and glistening with tiny drops of moisture. At the base of each was a single, staring, blacklidded eye. One of those black tentacles was thrust toward me. It reeked with an overpowering, fetid odor. At its extremity was a sharp, hooked claw, beside a black opening. I think the creature sucked its food through those hideous, retractable tentacles.
Stephen kills the thing with his pistol. This impresses Mother, who reviles all technology. Unfortunately a bunch more of the red rollers show up and chase them up a cliff. (I had to laugh a little, thinking of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!) Stephen’s terrestrial muscles save the day.
Once again I got a sense of deja vu. These rolling evil things are a dead ringer for Fredric Brown’s Roller in “Arena” (Astounding Science-Fiction, June1944). But that’s twelve years later! Brown must have been a Williamson fan, too. For more on “Arena” and how that ended up being Captain Kirk fighting the Gorn, go here.
The Eternal Ones
The Eternal Ones were once of the same race as the Mother. They built more and more technology so their bodies atrophied into brains with tentacles. The Eternal Ones became sterile and so sought to live forever rather than to procreate, thus their name. The two sub-species fought a war in which any captured by the Eternal Ones were forced to become like them. Most chose death rather than to join.
When Stephen finally meets the Eternal Ones:
Three grotesque machines were advancing upon us, about the platform. Queer bright cases, with levels and wheels projecting from them. Jointed metal limbs. Upon the top of each was a transparent crystal dome, containing a strange, shapeless gray mass. A soft helpless gray thing, with huge black staring eyes. The brain in the machine! The Eternal One.
Horrible travesties of life, were those metal things. At first they appeared almost alive, with their quick, sure movements. But mechanical sounds came from them, little clatterings and hummings. They were stark and ugly.
And their eyes roughened my skin with dread. Huge, black, and cold. There was nothing warm in them, nothing human, nothing kind. They were as emotionless as polished lenses. And filled with menace.
The quadruped design as well as the brain with tentacles is all very H. G. Wells’ Martians from The War of the Worlds (1898). Williamson has scaled them down so his hero can fight one with a metal bar. (See Frank R. Paul’s cover.) Another irony borrowed from Wells, who has his time traveler in the future, a scientific genius, armed only with a metal bar.
There is another inspiration that needs to be mentioned, Jack Williamson’s good friend, Edmond Hamilton. Hamilton wrote “The Comet Doom” (Amazing Stories, January 1928) about a race of cyborgs who invade earth from a passing comet. These Cybermen prototypes harvest brains for their metal army. This tale inspired H. P. Lovecraft’s Yuggothian brain jars in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (Weird Tales, August 1931). Plutonian space fungus use enslaved human brains to work their tech. Another Amazing Stories writer who used the idea was Neil R. Jones, who created the Zoromes first in “The Jameson Satellite” (Amazing Stories, July 1931), friendly cyborgs very similar to the villains in this piece. Williamson is in good company.
Defeating the Eternal Ones
The Eternal Ones have many machine marvels including the power bars. This electronic prison appears around you before you are transmat beamed away. That image is so common to us today from Star Trek and its many different versions that it is hard to realize how this was in Williamson’s time. Williamson used it earlier in 1930 in “The Cosmic Express” (Amazing Stories, November 1930) but the idea goes back to before 1900. (The transporter malfunction idea dates to 1885!)
Stephen destroys the transmat machine, and he and Mother escape. They travel across the weird landscape, back to the time machine. Stephen offers to take the Mother to Earth. She declines and leaves. The Eternal Ones, five machines, appear and run her down. Stephen leaves the time machine, taking up his copper bar, he battles the attackers. He kills three without much difficulty but the fourth one smashes him, crippling him onto death.
The Mother appears, saving the Earthman with her energy manipulation. Stephen kills the fourth machine but the last one wounds the Mother. The Eternal Ones all die under Stephen’s bar but the Mother is mortally wounded. He lies beside her all night and buries her in the morning. He returns to the time machine and heads back to Earth. It is a sad, poignant ending in the best Merritt tradition.
Conclusion
The Monsters of Jack Williamson’s “The Moon Era” are expertly crafted and skillfully borrowed from past Science Fiction. Williamson manages in the best Wells tradition, to discuss the value of technology and the fate of humankind in what appears to be an adventure story. Williamson never stoops to throwing in a beautiful young thing for Stephen to gawp over (the daughter of an mad scientist, of course). The adventurer’s relationship with the Mother replaces any juvenile need for a love interest.
After 1932, Williamson shifted away from Hugo Gernsback, who he sued for unpaid monies. In The Early Jack Williamson (1975) he says: “After a $50 partial payment for ‘The Moon Era,’ I received nothing from him until 1934, when I got a lawyer to collect $334 due me by then.” Jack would appear again in Wonder Stories but by this time he had already become an Astounding Stories writer. He sold to Harry Bates, F. Orlin Tremaine and John W. Campbell. Williamson was one of the older writers, like Clifford D. Simak, who became a Golden Age of Science Fiction alumnus. His skillful use of monsters was certainly part of this transition.
