Category Archives: Henry Kuttner

Moore Than Just a Kuttner Kornucopia

Detour to Otherness
Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
Cover art by Richard Powers
Introduction by Robert Silverberg
Afterward by Frederik Pohl
Haffner Press
Hardcover $40, limited edition hardcover $150

In the history of the science fiction and fantasy fields, there have been few authors as versatile as the husband and wife team of Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore. This is especially true at short lengths. (Since Kuttner was an early mentor of Ray Bradbury, this is hardly surprising.)

In the early 1960s, Ballantine Books published two collections of their work, Bypass to Otherness and Return to Otherness. Stephen Haffner states on the page for Detour to Otherness that a third volume was planned but never published. I’ve never heard this before, but I’m more than willing to take his word for it.

The first two Otherness titles contain selections from several of Kuttner’s most popular and well-remembered series. The Hogbens are represented, as is Galloway Gallegher, a scientific genius but only when he’s drunk. Also included is the first of the Baldy stories that comprised the mosaic novel Mutant. They don’t have some of his best known stories, which may not have been available at the time because they were in another book from a different publisher (Line to Tomorrow, Bantam), but this is one of the best samplings of Kuttner and Moore’s work.

Haffner has assembled enough stories for a third collection and combined them in the present volume. That section of the book is called Detour to Otherness, which is also the title of the omnibus.

Haffner had nothing to do with the selections in Bypass and Return, he was responsible to the stories in Detour. Thus, while critiquing the choices in the original volumes is a waste of time, it is very much on the strength of the stories in Detour that the volume will rise or fall. None of these stories has appeared in a Kuttner collection before, although most of them have been reprinted somewhere. I’d read almost all of them before. Let’s look at them more closely. Continue reading →

Graveyard Rats for Kuttner’s Birthday

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Henry Kuttner was born on this date in 1915. His first published story was “The Graveyard Rats”, which appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. It has been reprinted at least 35 times, the latest being in Zombies from the Pulps, edited by Jeffrey Shanks, which where I recently reread it.

Kuttner started out as part of the Lovecraft circle, and “The Graveyard Rats” is very much in the vein of Lovecraft. The story concerns Masson, a gravedigger in an old cemetery in Salem. The man has a profitable little sideline going, digging up the bodies and removing any valuables buried with them. The problem is the rats which infest the graveyard. They’ve dug a series of tunnels and steal the bodies themselves.

When the rats literally pull a fresh corpse out of the coffin and into the tunnels as Masson is opening the coffin lid, he decides to follow them in and retrieve his prize. This isn’t the smartest move he could have made…

Kuttner became a prolific author, writing some of his best work for Weird Tales, Astounding, and Thrilling Wonder. He wasn’t afraid to take chances and stretch himself as a writer and wrote horror, fantasy, sword and sorcery, science fiction, and mystery. After his marriage to C. L. Moore, the two collaborated on almost everything they wrote.

Haffner Press has been bringing Kuttner back into print, but even so, there are a number of his stories that are still in crumbling pulp magazines that deserve to be reprinted. I’ll be looking at some of those tales later this year.

I Hear From Henry Kuttner’s Great Niece

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Henry Kuttner

I’m going to do a “state of the blog” post sometime in the next couple of days, but I wanted to pass on something that I thought was really cool in its own separate post.

I’m still getting the occasional comment over on Blogger, and one of them was from Bridgette, Henry Kuttner’s great niece, commenting on the Kuttner birthday post. Here’s what she said.

Henry was my great uncle and sadly I have never read any of his work. Love reading things like this. Fall will be the time to do it.

And my reply:

Bridgett, thank you so much for your comment. Did you know him or did he pass before you were born? If you knew him, I would love to hear any memories you would care to share. You can reach me at keith@adventuresfantastic.com

I’ve moved the blog to a new site and carried all the content over. You can find it at www.adventuresfantastic.com. I’ll be writing more posts about Kuttner and Moore there over the fall and winter.

I replied on the original site in case she checked back. So far I haven’t heard anything from her. I’m hoping I will. I’ve not seen much biographical information about Kuttner, and I would love to know more about his life. While the thought of writing a biography is a daunting one, if I could get enough material for a book, I’d be willing to give it a try.

Happy Birthday, Henry Kuttner

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Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Henry Kuttner was born this day, April 7, in 1915. He passed away far too young in 1958.

Kuttner got his start in Weird Tales, his first story being “The Graveyard Rats”, a grisly little piece. Other stories for WT followed, and soon he was branching out into science fiction and the shudder pulps. Legend has it that he started using pseudonyms after writing stories that appeared in the first two issues of Marvel Science Stories, stories that almost got the magazine shut down for pornography. Supposedly no editor would buy stories with Kuttner’s byline for a while. Mike Resnick reports in his introduction to Girls for the Slime God (in which the above mentioned stories are reprinted) that in a late 1940s poll of sf readers, two of Kuttner’s pen names came in higher than his real name. Those pen names were Lawrence O’Donnell and Lewis Padgett. Not surprising since his best regarded stories are under those names.

Kuttner’s best work was done in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore. The story is that Kuttner wrote her a fan letter, not realizing that “C. L.” stood for “Catherine Lucille.”

Kuttner wrote in a wide variety of genres, including sword and sorcery. His tales of Elak of Atlantis (reviewed here, here, here, and here) as well as his two stories of Prince Raynor (reviewed here and here) helped fill the gap left by Robert E. Howard’s death.

It was in science fiction that he made his reputation. Stories such “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”, “The Proud Robot”, “The Twonky”, “When the Bough Breaks”, the Baldly stories (collected in Mutant), the Hogben stories, and countless others have remained popular and readable to this day, showing only a few signs of not aging well. His story “What You Need” was filmed as an original series Twilight Zone episode. Kuttner wrote a lot of what at the time was considered novel length work in the pulps, much of it still unreprinted. A few years ago I managed to get most of the pulps containing these stories, and over the next year or two I hope to make time to read and report on them. It’s also been long enough since I read some of them, that I need to refresh my memory.

There’s a lot of great Kuttner material that either hasn’t been reprinted or has been reprinted in such obscure places that it doesn’t matter. For example, “We Kill People” from Astounding‘s March 1946 issue is every bit as good as the stories that are the most well-known.

Kuttner’s work was marked by a dry, cynical sense of humor and a pessimistic outlook on life, and the stories often ended on a note of horror. As the 1940s turned to the 1950s, the Kuttner quit writing so much for the pulps. Part of this was burn-out, part of this was Kuttner was finally getting his college degree and then a master’s. He authored several mystery novels during this period. He passed away from a heart attack.

I first encountered Kuttner on a hot, humid afternoon the summer before I entered high school. I was taking a break and pulled out the SFBC edition of The Best of Henry Kuttner, which had arrived in the mail a few days earlier. Although I don’t recall why I purchased it, I suspect it was because Ray Bradbury, who was something of a protege of Kuttner’s for a while, wrote the introduction. The first story was “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”. My mind was blown. My life would never be the same.

Of all the science fiction and fantasy authors I’ve ever read, Kuttner is still my favorite. I thank God frequently that Stephen Haffner has reprinted so much of his early work. (I just wish he’d done it before I spent all that money tracking down those pulps.)

Kuttner (along with his wife C. L. Moore) is one of the few authors who has his/her own shelf in my library. (The others are Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett and her husband Edmond Hamilton, and Robert E. Howard, who books take up two shelves. Charles Beaumont would have his own shelf if he had written more books before he died.)

Much of Kuttner’s early work is clunky, but if you read his stories in chronological order, you can see him maturing. He was a writer who wasn’t afraid to stretch himself, to take chances and do something different. Just read “Happy Ending” as an example. The story is told in reverse, Ending, Middle, Beginning, and it works.

If you’ve not read Kuttner, you should. A large of number Big Names (Mariam Zimmer Bradley, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg, Mike Resnick) list him among their influences. Find out why.

Happy Birthday, Hank.

Blogging Northwest Smith: Black Thirst

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“Black Thirst”
C. L. Moore

SPOILER ALERT – You’ve been warned.

“Black Thirst” is the second Northwest Smith story, published in the April 1934 issue of Weird Tales shortly after “Shambleau”. Upon rereading, I found this story lacked the power of its predecessor. It may have been that I wasn’t able to get to the story until late at night, and therefore was fighting fatigue.

The story begins with Smith casing a warehouse along the waterfront of the Venusian city of Ednes one night when a woman walks by and asks him if he’d like to make a gold coin. This isn’t any ordinary woman, but a Minga woman.

When the first settlers landed on the shore, they found a giant castle ruled by a being, apparently a man, called the Alendar. He had a small entourage of the most beautiful women, which he began selling to the traders and settlers.

Over time, the Minga women, renowned for their exquisite beauty and chaste bodies, have been the prizes of kings, sultans, and chieftains throughout the solar system. They are never allowed to walk the streets at night alone and unescorted. But this one is.

She recognizes Smith, although they’ve never met, and raises her offer to one hundred gold coins. To receive it, all he has to do is come to a particular gate at the Minga castle in one hour, give her name, and enter.

Other men have died for lesser offenses against the Alendar.

Smith decides to take her up on the offer.

This part of the story was as clear in my mind as the day I first read it. What had faded were the events that followed. I had a vague memory of what happened but could recall no details.

Upon entering the Minga castle, Smith enters a dark world where beauty is the most prized and carefully nurtured commodity. And by nurtured, I mean bred. Although the woman Vaudir, who entices him into the castle, is one of the most beautiful women Smith has ever seen, she pales in comparison to the others he sees. Next to them she is plain and homely.

Smith also meets the Alendar, who isn’t a man even though he wears a man’s form. The Alendar can control people with his thoughts, and he takes Smith captive. He shows Smith women of such great beauty that it nearly drives Smith insane.

The Alendar is a type of psychic vampire that feeds on beauty, and he’s centuries old. The women in his stable have been bred for one purpose, and one purpose only. Food. The Alendar drains them of their beauty and their life essence. Only the least beautiful are sold as concubines and queens.

For most of those centuries, especially the most recent, the Alendar had fed on female beauty. But now he wants a taste of something a little different, male beauty. And Smith is intended to be the main course. It’s only with the assistance of Vaudir, and the sacrifice of her life, that Smith manages to escape.

While to my mind not as powerful as “Shambleau”, there are still some dark and disturbing implications in “Black Thirst”. First there’s the there’s the whole aspect of selling women. While Moore downplays it and makes it seem like an accepted practice, it’s really nothing more than slavery, and sexual slavery at that. At least that’s what’s implied when powerful men buy the most beautiful women in the solar system. Now I’m not saying Moore condones the practice. She never goes that far. Instead she states it for what it is, the selling of women by men for their beauty. Such things have been done for centuries, and in an exotic setting such as this, it’s really more of window dressing than anything else.

Where Moore appears be placing her emphasis is on the destruction of beauty. The Alendar, and by extension the men who buy women from him, are using women for the purpose of consuming and destroying their beauty. The women are used to feed, the Alendar’s life force and the men’s egos.

Is Moore saying that men destroy women for their beauty, that beauty is another commodity bought, sold, and consumed in a man’s world? I don’t know for sure, and like I said in the previous installment of this series, I don’t want to read too much amateur psycho-babble into the fiction. It’s an interesting thought, though. She certainly seems to be.

In her introduction to the Lancer edition of Fury, a novel she wrote with her husband Henry Kuttner, she talks about the themes that appear in an author’s work that the author isn’t consciously aware of at the time of writing. Hers, she writes, is “The most treacherous thing in life is love.” That’s another interesting thought.

In the two stories we’ve examined so far, love (or something associated with the sexual and/or romantic aspect of it) is presented as destructive and dark, twisted rather nurturing, and incredibly trecherous. Keep in mind, at this time Moore was unmarried. I know nothing about her personal life during this period, but I have to wonder. Had this attractive young woman been burned in a relationship? Had she witnessed friends or family members have their beauty consumed by a relationship? I don’t expect to ever find out. Such a thing would seem to be consistent with the Northwest Smith stories so far. But whether this interpretation is a sound one is a question I’ll leave to the professional literary scholars.

C. L. Moore Turns 102

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Catherine Lucille Moore was born on this day in 1911. She was one of the greatest fantasy and science fiction authors to work in the field. That’s the oldest picture of her I could find. I saw a photo of her when I was in college that was (I think) taken shortly before her death. She was sitting on the steps of a back porch, and the photo was shot from what I would consider an intermediate distance. If anyone is familiar with the picture and knows where I can get a copy, I would appreciate your letting me know.

I wrote a tribute last year and a belated tribute the year before, so I wanted to do something different this year. So after giving some basic facts, I’ll tell you what I have in mind.

First, the facts. Moore was working in an Indiana bank when she published her first story. The legend is that she wrote on a company typewriter after hours while working late. Legend also has it that Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright was so impressed by it that he closed the offices for the rest of the day. I don’t know for sure if either event actually happened that way, but if they didn’t, they should have. Moore went on to write some quite successful science fiction on her own before marrying fellow science fiction writer Henry Kuttner, probably my all time favorite author for at least three days of every week. After Kuttner died in 1958, Moore left the field. She remarried, and again legend has it, her new husband didn’t want her writing science fiction. Also again, I don’t know if that’s true. By this time she was writing for television, which paid considerably better.

She left quite a legacy, both on her own and with her husband. I’m going to take a closer look at that legacy this year. Again both her individual legacy and the one she shares with Kuttner. I’ve got a lot on my plate, and I can see I’ll need something to act as a sanity check.

For quite some time now I’ve been intending to take a closer look at her two signature series, Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith. Jirel was one of the first, if not the very first, sword and sorcery heroine who could swing a blade as well as any man. Northwest Smith was been called the prototype for Han Solo. I’ll deal with that in an upcoming post.

I’ve decided to start with the Northwest Smith stories (although I will cover the Jirel tales as well). They’re set in outer space, but they have strong fantasy elements, so I’m going to post the essays about them here rather than on Futures Past and Present. I intend to post the first one in the next day or so. Stick around. It’s been nearly 30 years since I read most of them, but images from some of the stories are still clear in my mind. They left quite a mark on a very impressionable young teenager. We’ll see how well they hold up to middle aged scrutiny.

December’s Agenda

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Finals start this week, so things will probably be hectic until around the 14th. My only final is Friday morning, but I’ve got a new lab manual to edit and send to the publisher by then. All of which means that posting here is going to be sporadic. I may post for two or three days straight, then not have anything new for a week or more. ‘Tis the season.

Here’s what I’ve got lined up as far as novels go. The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones is first up, followed by The Dead of Winter by Lee Collins. After that, it will be two science fiction novels, The Creative Fire by Brenda Cooper and Apollo’s Outcasts by Allen Steele. I’ll post those reviews over at Futures Past and Present. There are a couple of forthcoming novels I’ve committed to review, plus 3 from Angry Robot that I had intended to review in August before moving threw my schedule into chaos. Those will probably wait until January since none of the forthcoming titles have release dates before then.

I want to spend the rest of December getting caught up on stuff I’ve had on the shelf for a while that I haven’t been able to get to: some sword and sorcery, a few historical novels and collections, a lot of space opera, and some Henry Kuttner I’ve been wanting to either read or reread. Plus some noir, and The Bones of the Old Ones, the sequel to The Desert of Souls. I doubt I’ll be able to read all of that in the few weeks I’ll have, but I’m going to try. Of course, I’ll review some short fiction, too.

I’m not going to accept requests for reviews, nor will I be asking for many review copies over the next couple of months. I’ve mentioned a Sooper Seekrit Project a couple of times before. There are actually two now. I should be able to make one public by the end of the month; the other, I’m not sure when I can announce. In both cases, these are things I’ve been invited to participate in, and I’m really excited about them. There will be some changes here and at Futures Past and Present because of these projects, but I’ll wait until I can announce the projects before I discuss how my personal blogs will change.

Sword and Sorcery: Short or Long?

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The recent post on naked slave girls has generated a small but steady stream of traffic. Some of Al Harron’s comments have got me to thinking about some things that I’ll probably address in a follow-up post. In the meantime, I thought I’d ask a different question at the end of this post.

Much of the classic sword and sorcery, the stuff written by the likes of Leiber, Howard, Moorcock, and to a lesser degree Kuttner, Wellman, Anderson, Saunders,Wagner, etc. was in the form of short fiction: short stories, novellettes, and some novellas. Novels were rare in the early days. By the 1980s, though, when I began reading S&S, it was the other way around.

I realize that was in large part driven by the market. When pulps were the primary, if not only, source for S&S, then short fiction was what was written. As the market changed over time, and paperback novels replaced pulps and digests, of course writers would switch to novels. Some of the authors listed in the previous paragraph wrote equally well at all lengths.

What I’m interested in is the question of which fans of S&S prefer. It should come as no surprise that Robert E. Howard is my go-to guy for S&S. He was the first author I read who wrote the stuff. I’d been reading science fiction for a number of years before I read Howard and was familiar with Kuttner, but his S&S wasn’t available at the time. At least not to a teenager in semi-rural Texas. (I started reading Anderson about the same time.) With the exception of The Hour of the Dragon, Howard’s S&S was of the short variety. As a result, I tend to prefer S&S novelettes and novellas to novels.

There are a couple of other reasons as well. One, I can read a story in one sitting, two at the most if it’s a novella. This means if I have a block of time free, I can often read more than one. Novelettes and novellas are, in my not so humble opinion, the ideal form for fiction in general. They allow for character development, multiple plots, and detail in world building without much of the padding that often accompanies novels. Given my time constraints these days, there’s another reason I like shorter works. When it takes me a while to finish something, I tend to get frustrated with it, especially if the delay is due to interruptions or an uncooperative schedule. That rarely happens with novellas and novelettes.

So, just to satisfy my own curiosity, and to hopefully gather some very unscientific data for a future post, do most of you prefer S&S at the shorter lengths or novels? Or do you even care?

Year Two, Day One

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Although it doesn’t seem like it, it’s been exactly one year since I started this blog. I’ve learned a lot, not least of which is how much I still have to learn.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who follows my posts, whether formally, with your picture there in the sidebar, or informally, checking in when you have a free moment. While I haven’t met most of you in the flesh, I still consider those of you who have commented, and at times corrected my errors, friends. If we find ourselves at a convention or Howard Days or some other venue together, let’s make sure we make time for a drink or two.

I’ve got some things planned for this next year in addition to the ongoing series such as the posts about Conan, to give one example.

At the moment, I’ve got six novels I’m committed to review, including the sequel to Wolfsangel. That one will be posted in late September/early October to coincide with the release of the book. It’s number three on the reading list. I’m hoping to add a Twitter feed within the next month. That is if family obligations and dayjobbery will let me find the time.

This calendar year also marked several anniversaries I want to acknowledge before December 31st if possible. One is the five year anniversary of Cross Plains Universe. This was the anthology released at the World Fantasy Convention in 2006 as part of the Howard Centennial. Another is the tenth anniversary of the US publication of the Australian anthology Dreaming Down Under.

I started a comprehensive post on some of the collections of Henry Kuttner’s short fiction, both solo and in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore, that have been published in the last year or two. I’m still reading through the collections. Hopefully that post will appear sometime during the holidays.

I’ve also got some English translations of Kazakh historical novels I’ve been wanting to read. The typesetting is different than that used in US and British books, so I want to make sure I’ve got the time to read them without distractions.

Once again, I want to thank all of you who are regular, semi-regular, or occasional readers of Adventures Fantastic. If there’s anything you would like to see more (or less) of, please let me know.

Status Report and Thank You’s