“The Prowler of the Wastelands” by Harl Vincent shows a tenuous link between its author, Harl Vincent and the later work of A. E. van Vogt. The two cat-like protagonists share a bond that may be more than coincidence.
Enter the Prowler
“The Prowler of the Wastelands” appeared in Astounding Stories, April 1935. It was written by Harl Vincent, one of Hugo Gernsback‘s original writers, and a mechanical engineer from Buffalo, New York. In his fourteen-year writing career, he produced seventy SF tales, two for Argosy.
The plot follows the intelligent prowler as it wanders the desert and approaches an encapsulated city in search of human companions. The animal has an inbred yearning to be around them and live with them. It can no longer fight the urge and goes into a tunnel. He is attacked by robot police but the humans with them stop the machines. They recognize the sleek animal as one of Professor Rosso’s creations. It turns out to be 22X101, a kitten that its mother took out into the wastelands. Rosso injects the beast with hormones that increase its intelligence to near human proportions.
The cat falls for a human visitor, a woman named Lolita, a performer. Together, with his new intelligence, the pair become the hit of the circuit-cities as they are called. When a rich audience member sees the act, she wants to buy the animal who is now called Miracle. Rosso needs money and agrees. Lolita is ready to flee to the wilderness with her animal partner but Miracle won’t allow that. He leaves her with Phil Strawn, her boy friend, and goes back into the wastelands, back to eating rats, rather than make Lolita suffer. The cat makes another personal sacrifice. Rosso was going to do an operation on his vocal chords to allow him to speak. The prowler of the wastelands walks away from that much desired change.
The Prowler Returns
“Return of the Prowler” was published three and a half years later in Astounding Stories, November 1938, now edited by John W. Campbell. After wandering in the wastelands for awhile, 22X101 forgets Lolita. But he can’t forget his desire to be around humans. He nears another of the circuit-cities and sees something unusual. A cover in the ground rises up and a horde of repulsive dwarf-like creatures comes out. They are headed for the distant city. The cat creature runs ahead, wanting to warn someone. The same encounter with robot police and humans who recognize him follows. This time Miracle is in Chicago. (Previously he had been in New York.)
The man who finds him is named Forsythe. He contacts Rosso, who wants the animal shipped back. As the two argue, Miracle is anxious to tell of the invaders. He uses his old spelling act from his performance days to tell the men. Eventually, the Chicagoans follow him to the wall as the trogs cut through the protective steel. They blind the defenders with a bright burst of light.
A battle ensues with robot police, humans and Miracle at the center. The city-dwellers manage to hold off the invaders long enough for reinforcements. Miracle wants to keep fighting but Forsythe pulls him away. When Rosso shows up he has Lolita and Phil with him. There is a pleasant reunion. Rosso agrees to share Miracle with Chicago, as he plans to save the cat creature’s species. Soon there will be animals like Miracle all over the world. 22X101 is rewarded for his bravery and receives his vocal chord operation. The prowler of the wastelands’ first word is “Lo-li-ta”.
Vincent and van Vogt
Thus Vincent ended the series. He would stop writing Science Fiction a few years later though remain active in fandom for the rest of his life. He would write two more novels in the late 1960s.
Eight months later, in the pages of the same magazine appeared “The Black Destroyer” (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1939) by A. E. van Vogt. This story was the debut of the Canadian writer from Manitoba. He became part of John W. Campbell’s Golden Age roster with many classics of the 1940s like Slan, The World of Null A and The Weapon Shops of Isher. Dianetics would derail his career in the 1950s.
In an interview with Robert Weinberg he said he first read SF in Chum, a British annual and then:
Later, at age 14, I saw the November 1926 Amazing and promptly purchased it, read it avidly until Hugo Gernsback lost control and it got awful under the next editor, T. O’Conor Sloane. So I had my background when I picked up the July, 1938 issue of Astounding and read “Who Goes There?” It was one of the great SF stories; and it stimulated me to send Campbell, the editor, a one paragraph outline of what later became “Vault of the Beast.”
The Black Destroyer
“Vault” got a rewrite request, so van Vogt’s first publication was “The Black Destroyer”, about a cat-like alien called Couerl, that is wandering on a planet filled with wasteland. It feeds on “id creatures” but has eaten them all and starves for more. This is when the space explorers show up. The alien makes contact, realizing these are visitors from another world. It tours the ship while it plans to eat all the humans.
Thus begins a battle of wits between alien and astronauts. The Couerl can manipulate matter so it can walk through the walls of any cage. It even uses the steel of the engineering station to make its own small craft and escape. But it can’t evade the humans and decides to kill itself. Thus ends the first of the Space Beagle stories. These were fine SF tales though a little too similar to each other.
Connections or Coincidence?
To get back to Harl Vincent. Here is what twigged this connection for me. I had read van Vogt many years ago. He was standard reading for SF fans. I remembered that opening scene when Couerl sees the ship that was used on the cover of Astounding by Graves Gladney:
On and on Coeurl prowled. The black, moonless, almost starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept up from his left. It was a vague light that gave no sense of approaching warmth. It slowly revealed a nightmare landscape.
Jagged black rock and a black, lifeless plain took form around him. A pale red sun peered above the grotesque horizon. Fingers of light probed among the shadows. And still there was no sign of the family of id creatures that he had been trailing now for nearly a hundred days.
He stopped finally, chilled by the reality. His great forelegs twitched with a shuddering movement that arched every razor-sharp claw. The thick tentacles that grew from his shoulders undulated tautly. He twisted his great cat head from side to side, while the hairlike tendrils that formed each ear vibrated frantically, testing every vagrant breeze, every throb in the ether.
…And then, abruptly, he stiffened.
High above the distant horizon he saw a tiny glowing spot. It came nearer. It grew rapidly, enormously, into a metal ball. It became a vast, round ship. The great globe, shining like polished silver, hissed by above Coeurl, slowing visibly. It receded over a black line of hills to the right, hovered almost motionless for a second, then sank down out of sight. (“The Black Destroyer” by A. E. van Vogt)
You Be the Judge
And just the other day when I read “The Prowler of the Wastelands” for the first time:
The prowler sniffed of the breeze suspiciously. Its warmth was most gratifying, for he had traveled day and night from the northern wastes where the bitter chill of an early winter was already a threat to his very existence.
But this breeze carried to his sensitive nostrils an assortment of smells that made him uneasy and fearful. Uneasy, because they roused in his memory faint recollections which antedated his first clumsy scamperings at the side of his mother, who had long since died. Fearful, because they were entirely unfamiliar in any experience of his maturity.
He did not know the smells betokened his nearness to man’s greatest place of habitation. In fact, the prowler would not have recognized man as such had a representative of the breed appeared in the brush beside him. He had never seen a man. (“The Prowler of the Wastelands” by Harl Vincent)
Conclusion (or Not)
The similarity is not overt but the image of the cat creature encountering humans for the first time seems too similar to be completely an accident. I am not accusing van Vogt of plagiarism here, (which would be ironic, since he successfully sued the producers of Alien for using his ideas) only wondering if that young man back on the Canadian prairies, reading SF Pulps might not have read “The Prowler of the Wastelands” in Tremaine’s Astounding? Was that August 1938 issue the only SF Pulp he ever read after Gernsback? In another interview he says: I didn’t really become interested in science fiction until 1939, when I picked up a copy of Astounding Stories, and read what I thought was a fantastic science fiction story.” so it sounds like he may have missed “Prowler”. Did John W. Campbell publish Return of the Prowler” because the earlier story grandfathered it in? It doesn’t seem up to his new standard in 1939. Questions remain.
It is too late to ask now, but it shows how unimportant pre-Campbell fiction was to most. Nobody noticed the similarity for decades. Nobody else (as far as I know so far) ever asked about it. Harl Vincent’s work is largely forgotten by readers, and you can debate why. These Prowler stories aren’t brilliant as fiction or even Science Fiction but they have piqued my interest. I will be reading more of his work.
