Alexey Matveyevich Volkov - "Aliens" (1928)

INTRODUCTION

I can find no information on Alexey Matveyevich Volkov, possibly a pseudonym, aside from the fact that he died during World War II. "Aliens" was the only story Volkov published and was originally published in the February 1928 issue of "World of Adventure", where it made the cover of the issue. It was later republished in the March 1961 issue of "Searcher" in severely abridged form which cuts about half the text. This translation is taken from the original printing in "World of Adventure" which can be found here:

https://www.maxima-library.com/new-books-2/b/12656?format=read

This translation is based off the original February 1928 "World of Adventure" printing, with illustrations by N.M. Kochergina.

For what brief biographical information there is on Volkov, see: 

https://archivsf.narod.ru/persona/volkov/volk_a_x.htm

Cover of February 1928 issue of "World of Adventure"

ALIENS

I.

Two buoys entangled in anchor chains bobbed on top the waves in the impenetrable darkness of the tropical night.

The black water pushed up against some object and flashed with bright light; flaming streams of liquid fire were flowing about this object, splashing all around. Outlines of the buoys were drawn by the light of the streaming flames.

Instead of a flag, the tops of the buoys had wet hair and a pair of eyes on their sides, which despite the darkness, were wide open.

In Russia, the buoy with gray hair was called Nikolai Ivanovich Vragin, professor of biology. The second buoy was myself. In the water between us, the heavy grating of our deck hatchway floated us along according to whims of the current.

It seemed that several days had passed and merged into one continuous, languid night, from the moment when, after much hesitation, we decided to jump off of the side of the burning steamer into the water, throwing the hatchway grate off first. Clutching the grate, we floated side by side - it was too small to support the weight of even one of us.

A liquid light quivered near our very faces, diffused and elusive, illuminating the grating's black crosses. Dawn came unexpectedly and all at once. Suddenly the current died out, and sloping watery muddy gray mounds came out of the thinning darkness, slowly, smoothly rising and falling; our gnarled fingers dug into the rough grate, while Vragin's face was pale but calm.

Rowing with all our might, we now tried to steer our raft towards land.

The pre-dawn twilight in the tropics is short, but the sun had not yet risen when we approached close enough to where we could make out three human figures standing motionless on the top of one of the dunes, which from afar looked just like pegs driven into a hillock. One of the figures began to descend towards the water.

The hot, blazing sun rose from behind a ridge of sandy hills to the side. Colors began to sparkle, dazzling reflections were jumping around on the green-blue water.

Eventually, swimming closer, we peered intently at the figures on the shore. Europeans or natives? In a half hour we could find ourselves among cultured civilization or... in captivity. This is possible on the western coast of Africa, no matter what those enlightened people who imagine the whole world being like the outskirts of Peterhof or Sestroretsk say.

Lifted up by a large wave, I saw, much closer than I expected, a wide, white, winding strip - the foam of the surf. In the shallow water, the waves became stronger. The surf was thundering very close.

The yellow-red dunes were quite near. In the deafening chaos, the sounds of the ocean were like blaring cannon fire hitting ramparts nearby.

A large wave crashed into me and lifted me up on its crest, carried me along its rushing back, and with a thundering roar and a splash, awashed far onto the shore with great speed, spread out and rapidly gushed back in a foamy stream. Pebbles were bouncing around and making clicking noises like living beings; they hastily rolled after the receding water, as if they were afraid to fall behind and find themselves on dry land. Gasping, half-stunned, I found myself on the wet sand. All around, the rivulets of the runaway wave were still murmuring and foaming. On all sides, the waves were furiously raging. I laid there without making a single movement. Close by, about five paces away, among the tufts of foam and running puddles, Nikolai Ivanovich was crawling on all fours.

Twenty sazhens away, three men in dark overcoats were heading towards us in bold strides, no doubt those whom we had noticed from the sea.[Translators note: Sazhen; antiquated unit of measurement equal to seven feet.] The two in front had driving goggles over their eyes, and the third was wearing a pith helmet. Europeans! The ends of long, thin rods swayed elastically above their heads as they hastily moved. A rather ludicrous notion popped in my head - they've come to go fishing.

As if under the heel of a colossal beast, the gravel was making prolonged creaking and groaning noises. With the hissing and whistling of a monstrous snake and the speed of a bird, another huge wave flew in. Before I could turn my head, for a moment, out of the corner of my eye I saw, nearby, almost at my feet, a high wall of turbulent water curving forward, composed of rapidly moving bubbles as if it was boiling. The wall pushed a turbulent stream up the ground ahead of it. Seething and shuddering with a murmur, tightly curling up at the top like giant shavings, the wall loomed over me even further. The bubbles on its very crest quickly appeared, scattered and burst.

The wall came crashing down. I was lifted up and thrown about. The impact thundered like an explosion of gunfire. With heaps of algae and a river of water, I was ejected even further forward onto the shore. I felt the water pressure weaken, once again heard the clicking and bouncing of the running pebbles and the rustling of the gravel. Consciousness faded. Another hit and I'd be a bountiful feast for the crabs... At this thought, with desperate tension, gathering my last strength, gasping for breath, I hastily crawled away, blinded, half-stunned for several steps and without getting up, struggled for a long time to take a breath of air, choking on the water that entered my lungs.

At the same time, my thoughts flashed to those rushing to our aid. Of course, they're already approaching. They're probably from some nearby port or mission. All the same, now our misadventures will soon end... And how is Vragin?... My head was spinning, my whole body ached from bruises.

II.

I slowly stood up with difficulty, staggering from weakness. And, without yet raising my head, I noticed that they were standing very close, two steps ahead, to the left.

My gaze scanned the figure of the nearest one from his feet up to his head. And, my hands went immediately cold and numb, my face felt like it was being pricked with small needles from all the draining blood. It was something completely unexpected, as if the terrible head of a huge snake had suddenly shot up from the dense tall grass thickets with lightning speed and froze in ominous immobility right next to my very face.

Level with my eyes, the disgusting head of the vile reptile stood looking at me, terrible in its nightmarish ugliness.

How can I convey to you the delirious visions that appeared to me in flesh and blood on that inexplicable morning? A hallucination! A mask! - conjectures of a confused mind flashed and swirled in a whirlwind of sparks, replacing one another after a brief moment.

Instead of the face I expected, there was something unimaginably nightmarish, monstrous. Mistaken from afar for driving glasses, they turned out to be huge bulging walleyes, about the size of an average saucer. The eyes sat very close together, disproportionately large in comparison to an almost normal-sized head and occupied their entire face.

When viewed from a certain angle, thanks to their amazing size and color, it looked like their head consisted of only two huge eyes. They protruded from their sockets like convex porcelain-white lentils. No forehead, no cheeks, no cheekbones - just eyes! Two white balls on a neck, with a stem extending out from the shoulders. The shiny white enamel of the bulging walleyes was horizontally split in half from edge to edge by thin, black cracks - the slits of severely constricted pupils.

The rigid fold of the tightly closed, disgustingly huge frog-like mouth on dirty green skin, as well as the wrinkled and rough scales of a reptile dryly covering its entire head and the portion of the face that was free from its eyes, gave its head inexpressibly ferocious expression, nightmarish in its inhuman abnormality.

The slit of the wide mouth, curving upward, ended far up the sides of the head in flabby folds of skin under the ears, covered by the hanging earmuffs of a flat hat that looked like a pancake. The protruding, narrow and blunt jaw of the reptile without a chin made it possible to see the wrinkled, drooping, folded, sinewy neck of the alert lizard.

My amazed attention, initially distracted by the extraordinary, had missed a detail: - between the colossal eyes, right at their junction, there was a small, irregularly shaped hole - a single nostril - which as if sniffing at something, was convulsively contracting its nervous, lighter edges...

A terrible mask, frozen in a grimace of cold, merciless cruelty.

Without turning my head, I looked at the embodiment of a nightmare standing at arm's length from me. If I saw this head on a reptile's body, no less terrible and disgusting than the head itself, there would not have been that impression of repulsive unearthliness. But the monster's head on a human body! A felt cap on the ugly head of a snake! Confused, powerless thoughts struggled like a bird in a snare. A dream, a fairy tale in reality, it defied explanation.

Silently, as if from behind a thick stone wall, the rumbling and roaring of the surf reached my ears.

Sensing a strange lightness, feeling how my whole body, engulfed in the freezing cold, was quickly going numb and the earth was shaking beneath me, but unable to withdraw, as if my gaze was riveted by a magnet, I looked, without turning away, I looked in horror at the hypnotizing mask of the monster. Silent and terrifying, without moving, it looked into my face. And suddenly the narrow slit of the pupil instantly widened into an oval, the barely perceptible golden outline stretched, flashed with sparks of gold, a fire from hidden smoldering coals. Then, as if from the cutting pain of a bright light, the eyelid on the side, from the ear, covered the eye with a thin membrane, and the huge eyeball turned under the eyelid's translucent film, like a lizard basking in the sun.

Like a sharp drill, it bore into my brain with terrible speed. The dunes instantly lost their colors and the head of the reptile rushed into the abyss, then flew up to the sky...

III.

I don't know what happened next. Or how it happened. But I imagine that I saw everything. And this picture, in color and with sound, now appears before me in all its details. I see how a man who had fallen dead was lifted from the wet sand in the spray of the waves.

I imagine how they then carried us - Vragin and myself. And our two lifeless bodies swayed on thin flexible rods, in time with their footsteps. How their feet sank in the loose sand, how the breath of the disgusting mouths fanned our emotionless faces, and how they gazed dispassionately and blindly with their terrible eyes. How they silently carried us to the dunes, up into the sandy mounds. As if in the middle of the day, under the bright sun and blue sky, a procession moved openly - a procession of creatures materialized from a fairy tale, boldly mocking rational thought.

...Silence reigned. I opened my eyes. In front of my very face, fine, transparent red sand spread out in the glare of the sun, and rose several sazhens further upward in a gentle, crude slope. I was lying on my side, in the shadow of a large rock.

My head was still spinning. But my consciousness brightened. I quickly sat up and looked around in amazement. The sea... Surprisingly, the sea had disappeared! Even the sound of the waves couldn't be heard. I had just recalled the terrible meeting on the shore, but dismissed everything as hallucination, the product of prolonged nervous and physical stress. How else could it be explained if not by the play of upset nerves? But the rest of the details remained. Where is... the shore, the sea?.. With the intention of peering behind the stone, I turned around.

The bottoms of large oilskin bales, their cornices lying one on top of one another, were standing behind me.

There was nothing strange in this if I could find myself here, but it was very strange that I was abandoned, left without guard. Vague conjecture stirred within me. With my heart gripped in anticipation of the unknown, I cautiously looked out from behind the "rock." About ten paces away, more bales in tarpaulins, tin crates, three or four iron barrels of oil, several folded mattresses, and several large chests of polished wood were scattered in disarray on the sand.

It was only because I was sitting close to the bales that were separated from the total mass of cargo that I didn't initially see this open-air warehouse.

Stretching my head even further, I pulled back as if I had been burned. A hot wave flooded my chest. I saw it again. It was sitting on a bale, among the cargo. A convex diving helmet now covered its head down to its shoulders, but behind the smoky glass I immediately saw the porcelain-white eyes. Nearby, was the thin shaft of a long spear standing upright with its end driven in the sand, clearly visible against the light blue sky.

IV.

My first impulse was to run. But how? Crawling along the bare sand was a childish idea. Cover myself with a crate, sneak behind it and then cross the dune?.. But what is it? Is this hallucination still?.. No, no!.. Of course not. Suddenly it dawned on me: - madness. So deformed physically and mentally, he could not be normal. That's an explanation for the diving helmet on its head.

How could I escape unnoticed!

I turned around, crawled to the other end of the bale, looked around the corner and was speechless, petrified by the horrifying picture. On the tarpaulin, stretched out on his back, was the motionless body of Vragin lying in an unbuttoned frock coat. Two monsters were bent over the body, unnaturally arching their spines like ridged caterpillars. One slowly plunged a large, thin, shiny needle into my friend's slightly heaving chest. Another, also wearing a helmet, held Nikolai Ivanovich's outstretched, raised arms.

It would be a reckless death in vain to try to save Vragin. But... leaving him to a terrible death under torture... I was certain that the memory of the base cowardice and meanness on display would never cease weighing on me for the remainder of my life.

Realizing the madness of this act, with the anguish of waiting for the unavoidable, inevitable death, I jumped up, as if against my will. An involuntary cry escaped from my throat.

At that very moment, whistling shrilly, as if thrown by a spring, the seated monster launched up high with the leap of an amazing acrobat, jumped two sazhens closer and, waving his spear in mid-flight, pointed it at my chest. It turned out that he was sitting on Vragin's head. If I had just looked further away the first time, I would have seen them all at once.

The thin shaft swayed like the steel tip of a rapier. I knew that if by some miracle I was not pierced, then I risked being struck by the slightest erroneous movement. For several moments, I stood motionless. Somewhere nearby a bird chirped. The monsters by Vragin stood straight up and looked at me. Through the silence, my keen hearing caught the barely audible sound of the sea and the sharp cries of seabirds, faintly reaching me from behind the dune on the right. The sea, therefore, was not particularly far away. I had previously determined its direction by means of the sun.

The camp was located between the dunes, in a depression shaped like an irregular horseshoe. A sandy grave!.. But maybe it's not too late to calmly turn around and escape? I seemed to forcefully turn a lever in my brain, suppressing this thought and compelled myself to move. With dying languor, in the hopeless despair of being sentenced to death, I moved slowly, approaching Vragin. A small red spot was on the left side of the chest under the heart.

I picked up the cold corpse. Why? I was like a wound-up automaton. For the third time that day, everything that happened seemed like a dream to me.

The sun was scorching, the sultry air was flowing, the hot sand breathed heat that burnt my bare feet; with their plumage camouflaging them in the color of sand, the invisible birds of the dunes chirped and whistled. With a clouded consciousness, every second expecting to hear a wild scream, enduring the terrible pain of the impact, under this heavy burden as if inside a red fog, I slowly moved my feet in the loose sand. But arshin after arshin, a pink cloth unfurled in front of my lowered face and the moments slowly dragged on - no shouting, no sound of footsteps chasing after me![Translator's note: Arshin, obsolete unit of measurement equal to 28 inches.] Only the birds, frightened by my advance, increased their whistling.

I was irresistibly pulled into looking back - the silence was so unexpected. Now I'm only surprised how I was able to carry Vragin these hundreds of steps. A thick, twisted cacti with a pale shadow at its base was creeping past me... Bare sand again... Once more, I almost stumbled on the cacti and looked back. The loose plume of the hill obscured the view of the path that I traversed.

The extreme nervous and physical tension immediately broke. I dropped Nikolai Ivanovich's body and fell unconscious. However, it seems that I immediately woke up and turned over towards Vragin. The reddish dot on his bare chest blurred into a wide spot of sunburn. I put my hand on my chest and immediately took it off - there was no doubt - I'd been carrying around a corpse - the risky attempt had been in vain. They've killed him! There, on the bale, Vragin was still breathing. I bent down, looked carefully, and couldn't find a trace of the injection. This last blow finished me off.

There was no point in expecting outside help. It's unlikely that anyone would wander out here. The only thing left was to go around. I calmly drew conclusions and turned about. The dark blue smooth surface of the tranquil ocean spread out in a convex area, like it was part of a colossal mirrored sphere. The blue, gradually turning pale, turned further into a transparent white haze and merged with the cyan sky. And on the cyan-blue background were red waves of sand. The expanse and profound tranquility of the desert.

One row of dunes separated us from the flat coastal strip. For a moment, my attention was drawn to movement on the large dune opposite. Four men in helmets climbed up from the shore side and began to descend into a ravine, dragging heavy sacks.

The camp, in the form of a scattered pile of luggage in disarray, was visible forty sazhens to the left in the ravine. Figures were moving there too. This means there were not just three of them. Indifferent to my fate and the fate bestown upon Vragin, I mechanically sank to his body. And suddenly, he opened his eyes wide. Vragin was lying on his side, steadily and deeply breathing. Out of surprise, my apathy temporarily dissipated. I feverishly examined him a second time. A reddish spot covered the entire chest up to the neck. I covered the sleeping man's head from the scorching rays, laid down next to him and immediately fell asleep.

V.

I woke up from the extremely unpleasant sensation of being watched. The nightmarish catlike eyes of the ugly creature stared into my eyes with an unbearably intent gaze from narrow pupils. Holding its spear in its hands, it stood three steps away, peering into my face, as if trying to read something on it. Quite instinctively, I cowered, expecting to be struck. We looked into each other's eyes for a minute. Not a single human thought, not a single feeling was reflected in the living mask. It was the face of a living sphinx.

The creature suddenly bent down quickly and grabbed a handful of sand. He pointed towards himself, towards the sea, upward, and, drawing back its spear while throwing the sand into the air, he made a rapid movement, piercing the cloud of falling grains of sand in mid-flight. And he stared at me motionless. I dumbly followed his movements. What was he saying? Something about himself, of course. But what? Perhaps about a shipwreck, about the storm and lightning that struck the ship? I nodded my head. My gaze fell on the end of the lowered spear. I ran my hand over the thin band on the shaft, and a shiver of disgust ran through my body - such smooth, worm-like fingers, like fingers without joints, of a green frog leg, clasped the shaft.

The monster turned, quickly, without looking back, walked towards the camp. I watched him with an indifferent gaze. Without trying to explain them, I accepted the facts and nothing more.

- "Enough sleeping!" - I heard Vragin's laughing voice penetrate my dreams. Thundering noises shook the air, like the firing of deployed batteries from behind the dune. The sun was setting. "Then snore, the dunes will crumble," Vragin smiled.

He was sitting up. A sleeve, torn from his undershirt, was wrapped around his head like a turban. He spat out some green gum and handed me a piece of cactus with its spines worn-down. "Are you thirsty? - instead of water for now. Yes - here" - he tore off a second sleeve - "cover your head!" With a glimmer of joy, I became convinced that Vragin was the same Vragin.

I told him all the details of what happened. His eyes sparkled at the mention of the meeting on the shore, and at the end of the story, they glowed with excitement. Is it possible that in our age an unknown tribe could exist, even in Africa? Maybe a disease, causing the bulging eyes?

- "Hardly. These are aliens... Let's get closer to them! However, my knee is badly bruised. I'll lean on you - help me."

Beyond the winding ravine, a view of their camp appeared with a seated solitary figure. The other five were scurrying about on top of the large dune. Reflecting the dazzling rays of the sun, a network of huge cobwebs spread between thin stakes was glittering and sparkling. Yes, they weave a web! The sentry, turning his head, watched our approach, but was no longer grasping his weapon.

Apparently there was no danger to us. I took a closer look at their amazing ugliness. I felt a complete loss of strength, an irresistible fatigue, I wanted to lie down and fall asleep.

Birds whistled in alarm.

- "Now as well?!"

- "What?" - I didn't understand.

- "Did you whistle? Or was it the little birds"?

- "All the time. But why...?"

- "Did they whistle back just now too?" - Vragin interrupted impatiently. "You didn't say a word? - This means they are!.. - And the others are responding... Let's move away... For now."

We sat down by the first group of cacti. I chewed and sucked a cactus, closed my eyes, but could not fall asleep. Vragin was hypothesizing. Occasionally, individual words escaped his lips: "Evolution... Lizards... Another path... But the helmets?.."

From the camp, tearing through the sultry air, a wild screech came, was replaced by a short, vicious clicking sound and turned again into a screeching grinding and howling, like the running of a circular saw.

Vragin jumped up, groaned, and wandered limping towards the camp. I saw him come up, stand for about five minutes, turn around and go back.

- "A short rod is inserted vertically into a large crate, and a cloudy sphere is rotating on the rod with a terrible speed. Those sounds are coming from the crate." He sat down silently and thought.

The piercing sound, not ceasing until sunset, rushed through the ravine and spread across the deserted surroundings.

- "Listen, the tide is going out soon. It's time! Let's go get dinner."

We crossed the dune near the netting on the stakes. Six nickel-plated rods two meters long stuck into the sand and fenced off a small round area, three or four meters in diameter. In its center stood a seventh rod - the shortest. A dense network of the finest gossamer threads of wire connected the upper ends of all seven rods with one another like a silk veil.

Coming back, we carried our catch of crabs, shells and dry logs from the shore. The sun was quickly setting behind the dune, and a slanting shadow was creeping towards us. The shadow crawled to the camp. All sounds instantly fell silent. Our fire burned in the deepening shadow of the ravine, and we crunched on the baked crabs as the sun set.

In the darkness of the rapidly approaching night, five figures could be seen hastily climbing the dune and disappearing behind the gray ridge.

- "Did you see them? Let's go. And note: low tide. You said that in the morning you also went during low tide. - And were carried. - Let's go check it out! Maybe we'll solve a piece of the puzzle."

We climbed up close to the stakes.

In the ever-deepening darkness below, the familiar coastal strip stretched out before us. The sea, which had already retreated far away, left puddles of water, strips of silt and mud, slippery fragments of rocks, and heaps of algae. Five black specks, sometimes merging into one, moved in the distance, quickly approaching the water. Straight ahead, above the low, long waves of the ebb tide, towered a black mass exposed by the sea; it could have been mistaken for a large block of stone - a flat, but wide underwater rock, if the five from the camp hadn't been heading there.

- "Their sunken ship."

- "A ship, yes, but is it theirs? Isn't it ours? And the cargo from our ship..." I objected.

An hour and a half later, in the light of the stars, they approached from below, hauling heavy cargo. From somewhere on our side from behind the dune, a jackal leapt out. Having stumbled upon us, it darted away in fear and headlong like a black ball, rolled down towards those walking below. But this thief of the night would not be startled a second time. There was a flash from a blinding burst of lightning, with a thunderous blow that rumbled the earth. The jackal disappeared. We were showered with sand. The group, as if nothing had happened, continued to move.

- "There's an interesting case of a lightning strike." - Vragin looked up. - "And it made short work of the poor devil! Rough luck."

They walked by silently, without uttering a sound. But... five left, six returned. Discussing this occurrence, we descended. I went straight to the smoldering coals to fan the fire. Vragin thoughtfully turned and went into the camp and carried out two large woolen blankets from there.

- "A whole pile is loose. They didn't take them away," he explained laconically. - "They fiddle with the mattress. I think it's a folding tent," Vragin finished, making himself more comfortable on the sand and wrapping himself in a blanket.

VI.

Turning over half an hour later on my other side, I managed to catch how, against the background of the starry sky above the neighboring camp, something huge shot up in a dense cloud of black smoke and almost instantly disappeared into the heights.

Flashes and flickering on the dune caught my attention. Blue, green, ultramarine sparks were flashing, jumping between the glowing stakes and dancing in the wire network of the web.

I woke Vragin up. Lifting ourselves on our elbows, we watched the flickering of multi-colored lights. Vragin got up, walked around, and sat down on the blanket again. Were we hallucinating?

A bright meteor slid smoothly and softly across the starry vault, leaving a long smoky trail. The straight line of dim light slowly melted away.

Suddenly Vragin jumped up.

- "Hurry! Over there! Over to them! Hurry! Hurry!"

He spoke these last words while running. I ran after him, not wanting to leave him to his own devices. He ran towards the camp. A rapid approach could be considered an attack and met with weapons - even with sticks.

Silhouettes moved leisurely in the camp. Did the alerted sentries there wake up or did they not sleep at all? I heard their strange whistling. After a few steps, Vragin slowed down, and we approached at a walk. They treated our arrival with apathy, or rather, indifference.

But Vragin impulsively grabbed the hand of the nearest one, then bent down, grabbed a handful of sand and repeated the gesture of the creature who woke me up that day with his gaze.

The effect of the strange gesture was amazing!

Under heavy stress, I slowly moved my feet in the shifting sand.

Except for the seventh, who was absorbed in some activity near an open crate, the rest let out a whistle and surrounded us in a ring, looking at us as if they had only just seen us. I moved closer to Vragin so that we could meet an attack together. Their terrible heads and eyes moved in very close. Their pupils expanded from narrow slits to the size of glass in a large pocket watch and reflected the dancing sparkles of the stars.

- "They're up to no good." - My voice stopped. - "After all, this is the height of recklessness..." - I didn't finish. Vragin squeezed my shoulder and almost screamed from the excitement gripping him.

- "You're wrong. Understand this, damn it. They are from another, real, alien world. They are as natural and normal as we are."

Unshakable confidence sounded in Vragin's voice.

And so, what happened was something that could have only been foreseen, could have only been fantasized about by the most ardent of dreamers.

Since that night, I've known that any day, any hour, we can expect guests from the unknown. And since that night I haven't said the word "impossible."

Their melodic, lively whistling voices, singing, speech, or rather, sounds I can't identify, sometimes reminded us of the ringing of the sleepy chirping and whistling of a awakened flock of birds heard through the night's silence, disturbed accidentally in the middle of the night in their dense foliage of dormant bushes.

The dark cloud seemed to swallow the moon. In the encroaching darkness, obscured by the light of the moon, an unevenly pulsating purple radiance was weakly shining, hung like a halo above the crate with the silhouette of a bent figure in a helmet. The convex glass reflected a blue splotch. Faint, quiet squeaking and chirping could be heard from the crate.

One approached the cylinder on folded bales and a beam of parallel rays of bright sunlight flooded the camp and rested on the dune, cutting through the darkness of the sandy depression.

The pupils of those around me constricted again into narrow slits, but their whole appearance didn't seem nearly as disgustingly terrible to me now as it had during the day. The one standing closest to me touched the crate; the lid softly bounced up on the rods in the corners. Inside the crate lie meticulously stacked piles of papers.

A shiver of excitement took possession of me. We stood on the threshold of one of the secrets of the universe, the veil was lifted from an unknown world, lost in star dust, in the immeasurable distance of infinity.

VII.

The one that opened the crate took a long narrow sheet from the top and pointing to the starry sky, handed it to us. I stared with greedy eyes. At the top of it was a drawing of a spiral nebula. Below, a second drawing showed it magnified, no longer as a nebula, but as a visible star cluster with a small square outlined in red at its edge. In a third drawing, which only depicted an enlarged part of the cluster, a proportionally enlarged red square separated several dozen stars of varying brightness from similar ones, and encompassed inside of the square was a small blue triangle that enclosed a single star, which, however, appeared no different from any of the others. In the next drawing, inside a large blue triangle, a bright star burned with blue fire; in the drawing even lower, the star clearly was split into two.

We seemed to be rushing with quickness of thought, piercing the abyss of the universe in some specific point that we were approaching.

In the last drawing, both luminaries of the greatly enlarged double star, surrounded by thin swirling wisps, were so skillfully painted with amazingly executed strokes that as if looking through the eyepiece of a super-telescope, I saw two glowing suns, one blue and one orange, revolving around a common center. For a moment I forgot that it was only a drawing in front of me. Below the drawing was a diagram of their solar system - two tiny dots - grains of sand circling around their suns.

Drawn on the side were two circles of noticeably different diameters, connected by thin dotted white lines on the diagram that indicated the comparative sizes of the planets. The smaller planet was closer to its orange sun than the blue sun's planet.

The drawings and figures, extremely clear, had a sequence, building upon one another.

Probably, such cases were foreseen, and all these sheets with maps and drawings were specially made to be carried on board the expedition in order to help explain things to the inhabitants of other worlds.

They unfolded a large wide sheet with eight flat projections. The silvery areas denoted water, we were informed of this by a gesture towards the sea.

The smaller sized planet's only landmass was not very large, more like an island among the planet's continuous ocean than a continent. It was brown in color. But three vast, bizarre shapes of dark green color, splotches with blurry edges among the solid ocean, were a mystery.

An additional color drawing cleared up the confusion. A dense jungle of bright green plants of strange shapes, more like grass than trees, but grasses of a colossal, overwhelming size, rising straight out of the water to a terrible height, surging above the surface of the greenish-tinged waters. There was perhaps a boat, perhaps a large sheet on the water, and the two large-eyed humanoids that emerged from the water by the base of the stem gave one an idea of the enormous height of this sea jungle.

Unfolding the sheet silently, but with eloquent movement, he traced over it in a circle and, with a pointed metal needle, drew another planet near the other circle, almost equal in diameter, as a comparison of the size of our Earth with the size of this planet.

On a second sheet, equally wide, eight flat projections showed a map of the surface of the blue sun's planet, the one they inhabited. The finest geometric network of hexagonal cells covered all the maps on both sheets. But here, in addition to the land, water and the grid, there were many other markings, the first one that caught the eye was an encircled sphere in the center, as if it was being clasped by a thin bracelet - this was a golden thread that wound around the planet over its equator several times, through seas and land.

Red spots, green spaces, yellow stripes, dashes, dots, squares and circles of different colors and sizes in a bright motley pattern covered the land and part of the sea. Straight thin lines of different colors on the water and dotted lines on land... The eye discovered more and more new signs. All of these needed explanatory drawings; only the silvery twists of the rivers were clear.

Nearby, dry, clicking noises were raining down, as if two large, empty chestnuts were frequently clapping against one another.

Vragin straightened up, as if having come to his senses.

- "Listen," he spoke quickly, throwing out abrupt phrases. - "Tonight, an aerostat soared to the edge of the atmosphere. A sphere - instead of a wireless telegraph mast. Perhaps not the first. Possibly last night too. There's a stellar antenna on the dune. That one, in the helmet, works the apparatus. They're calling someone from the abyss of outer space. It seems they're not alone. They're rushing to make contact. With others, who race at the speed of light and - we can really say with confidence - no - even faster, racing through the silent depths of interstellar deserts. They're in a rush to communicate so that they won't be separated by an unimaginably huge distance, inaccessible even by their waves. They don't intend to stay here, on our Earth, an illuminated speck of dust hanging in the black void of the abyss. On a speck of dust, which they landed on only for a brief moment on their enormous voyage, and accidentally crashed. Their gesture with sand signifies a path through the stars. The delicate, multi-colored sparks in the antenna are the answer. You can expect them to appear any minute. Those who answered just now. Did you hear their voices?! They're now sending them a response." 

Signals! Maybe directions!

Under the influence of the previous thought, he grabbed his head.

- "Our duty to humanity, to earthly culture, is not to break communication, not to miss the opportunity... An exceptional case, perhaps - one every thousands of years. Let's focus all our brain power on this. In ten minutes we need to find a solution. Let's move away, we'll unwittingly get distracted here."

He dragged me away from the camp, almost forcibly. We silently reached the abandoned blankets. Vragin sat down and turned around. The apparatus was silent. Half a minute later the floodlight went out. The earthly night surrounded us, shrouded us in darkness, and twinkled with stars...

VIII.

And then I saw how against the background of the dark blue sky above us, the edge of the cloud that covered the moon suddenly began to rotate, as if captured by a strong whirlwind in the air, or the upper end of a tornado, and was torn to shreds.

Sparks rained down on the dune like fireworks, a cloud of blue flame shot up and the dune blackened. The apparatus in the camp cracked five times in a row, broke off and fell silent. High above our very heads, a small cloud appeared in a sharp, perfect circle. Without moving from its center, without losing its perfect shape and thickness, it rapidly increased in diameter.

I barely had time to understand that it was falling like a rock, and in a second now it would fall upon us, as something enormous in the giant black circle was hanging over the ravine, tens of meters above the ground. Slowly, smoothly and silently it sank even lower and froze motionless in the air. Starting to understand, I watched with bated breath.

For a moment, a large oval of white light was shining on the sand all around us. The floodlight on the pole flickered, trembled, and went out. From below, the beam of another floodlight rose vertically and, resting on something impenetrable, illuminated the metal's flat, even, moving surface.

A huge disk the size of a large circus arena emerged out of the darkness, rotating slowly and silently like a gramophone record.

A narrow sheaf of rays from the lower floodlight shone in a white circle at its very center, far from covering the entire area of the metal, and through the thick darkness, only scattered and reflected the light that vaguely outlined the rest of the disk to its very edges, the borders of the huge circle, a half-lit mass hanging over us.

Then the ship of the ether sank even lower and hung with a flat, vast arch in the air, three sazhens above the ground.

The smooth surface of the metal above and the slightly undulating area of dimly lit sand below formed a wide, but narrow gap; the light of the floodlight in the center supported the low, flat ceiling like a pillar.

We ran towards the camp.

The floodlight illuminated the central portion of the ship's underside.

In the very center of the disk, which continued its slow rotation, the hole of a round hatch blackened in a wide convex frame of white polished metal. The immobility of the carriage indicated that only the ship's outer shell was rotating.

While Vragin, gesticulating, tried to explain something to the two large-eyed inhabitants of the distant world who were silently watching and trying to understand him, I observed an unfamiliar, unusual activity.

From the hatch, an elevator cage descended on two thin tubular rods. As soon as the one in the helmet went inside it, the cage took off and plunged into the black hatch. Following this, a large tangle of jumbled metal joints appeared and slowly began to crawl out of the hatch, crawled out and sluggishly unclenched into a huge hand and an elbow then lazily appeared behind the hand. It was as if the Cyclops, waking up, was stretching overhead. Half-opened fingers hung an arshin above the ground. Suddenly coming to life, the hand rose, turned bending its elbow, stretched out, extending over our heads under that very arch, the metal hand carefully lowered onto the two outer bales, and the metal fingers squeezed the bales like a hawk would a chicken, and in an instant disappeared inside the hatch with its prey.

One went to the dune - of course, to remove the antenna. Everything pointed to an imminent departure.

Low overhead, spreading far in all directions and lost in the twilight, the matte surface of the metal slowly rotated like a straight, even ceiling.

In a flash, a thought, a fearful human thought, flared up and grasped the heart with a clawed fear.

What if suddenly, for a second, the amazing force ceased to function, wrested from nature by the genius of these unknown creatures encased in metal armor? It would crash into the ground like a monstrous hammer, now raised above our heads - the terrible weight of the ship and these suspended machines. In a brief moment, the gap will close... In a moment, the unimaginable pain of crushed bones. Our heads under inexorable pressure. During these moments I wanted to run out from under the ship into the open space of my homeworld's night. But an even stronger voice, the voice of human pride and reason, ordered me to remain in place until the end.

IX.

The excited, joyful voice of Vragin shouted:

- "It's over! I've done it!.."

- "What?.. Are they staying?" - I rejoiced.

- "No, I'm going with them... It's my only way out of here. The connection will not be broken. I'll be back in ten to twenty years. During this time I'll be able to learn a great deal."

- "But you might not come back!"

- "I'll be back, believe me. They're definitely flying! A whole squadron. Take care of Lida."

We descended and rose up in the elevator. And the iron hand of the locked Cyclops that protruded from the hatch carefully and lightly placed the heavy cylinders and crates on the sand, as if it were playing with toys. Then, unexpectedly and silently, the aviostella broke from its place, rose several meters almost completely imperceptibly to the eye, and, without rotating, lowered its hatch, sped up, and disappeared behind the dune.

As dawn quickly arrived, we climbed on top of the dune. Above the sea, above the bulk of the ruined ship slightly protruding from the high tide water, almost touching the crests of the running shafts, hung the huge millstone of the aviostella, frozen in the air.

I then saw how like iron under a magnet obeying an unknown force, the bulk of the sunken ship was pulled out of the shallow water.

As if bound by invisible chains, the two airships rose together, one above the other, until they disappeared behind a mother-of-pearl cloud, scattering it to pieces. Here, the two circles, the two flat pills appeared in the bright sky and, quickly increasing in size, smoothly descended over the ravine.

From the side of the dunes, in the morning light, one could get an excellent view of the enormous size and shape of these amazing structures. Both alike in size and shape, they resembled a simple millstone enlarged to the area of a large circus. But even from the dunes I couldn't see whether or not there were any hatches or windows on top; only the edge of the upper section was visible, about ten meters from the lower one.

We went down into the ravine. In the narrow hole under the ship it was gloomy, ghastly. One ship hung with its hatch above the cargo. By the light coating of greenish algae, I recognized the newly raised ship.

A head peeked out from the open hatch. They, it would seem, have not all come to land.

The mechanical arm quickly pulled in the load.

Then our short-lived neighbors began to ascend. One handed me a folded map which was used during their recent explanations with Vragin. Vragin shook my hand.

- "Wait, give my last regards to Lida. Well, she won't forget me."

- "Nikolai Ivanovich!.."

He didn't let me finish.

- "Yes, I know. I know you, and I can be at ease. I'm counting on you. Wait for me... We'll land in the clearing behind the house... Though it will be in twenty-five years... Wait for me."

He once again shook my hand with his trembling hand. They raised up the last guest of the Earth. The empty cage lowered. Vragin entered. We exchanged a final handshake. Under my left palm, I felt the metal of the elevator, and the cage disappeared into the metal armor. A few moments later, Vragin's head and shoulders appeared behind the railing in the hatch.

- "Farewell!"

The hatch's opening was blackened by a round pupil... I heard from the darkness:

- "Farewell!.."

The pupil closed tightly, securely...

Imperceptible to the eye, the gray bulk of the giant millstone began to rise.

Faster, faster and even faster, the huge disk was spinning. Suddenly I noticed that it was already much higher than it had just been. A strip of blue sky appeared around it.

When it was at an altitude of several tens of meters, still continuing to rise vertically, and the eye could no longer notice the rotation, I began to look for another ship. Much higher, already at the height of a verst, quickly tapering in diameter, it stood overhead, screwing into the sky.[Translator's note: Verst, an antiquated measurement about 1.067 kilometers] Then the small circles contracted into dots. The dots then melted in the sky. The feeling of unimaginable nervous tension weakened and disappeared.

X.

I stood alone in the middle of the deserted ravine. There was a moment when suddenly I wanted to be there, with Vragin... At the cost of my life! Only the image of Lida and Vragin's last words prevented me from falling into the sand in despair.

Two days later, a dinghy with sailors under command of an officer of a British cruiser, who arrived too late in response to our telegraphed distress call, picked me up not that far from that spot.

The good sailors didn't want to leave without making an attempt to pick up survivors on the shore, and, while searching, they rowed around the part of the shore where the current and tides would wash up either the corpses or the living. I was half-delirious and did not want to part with the piece of colorful paper.

The young naval officer questioned me very carefully, and carefully examined and analyzed the map. It seems he even made a copy. But I almost nothing I told him was coherent, not out of any deliberate action, but because my thoughts were just running wild. I was delirious. He was probably not far from off figuring that out. And, of course, he was the only person I met who accepted the possibility of the events that I've recounted and could believe me.

XI.

- "Where's that map, Alexander Matveyevich?" - asked one of those listening to this unusual story.

The narrator pointed to the partition between the windows.

- "You, most likely, figured it was an enlarged map of Mars? Come closer! You know, no one's believed me... At best, they've advised me to take out a patent for the new composition of paints and method of papermaking which I've allegedly used to draw up this map."

- "And Lida?.." - I asked uncertainly.

He looked at his wife sitting next to him with a smile.

- "Lida will now treat you to tea. The bus to Sochi won't be here anytime soon." And he finished seriously:

- "And so we'll wait. They'll be coming down here. We have been waiting for 14 years and will wait until the end of our lives. They'll be back!.."

Episode 39 transcription - Fandom, fanzines and fanfiction

(listen to episode on Spotify)

(music: Chrononauts main theme)

introductions and recent reads

Nate:

Good evening, and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate, and I'm joined by my co-host Gretchen and J.M. How are you guys doing tonight?

JM:

Good. Really good.

Gretchen:

Yes.

JM:

Feels very autumnal right now.

Gretchen:

Yes. Finally.

JM:

I'll be getting into it shortly, but I'm reading a lot of autumnal stuff right now.

Nate:

Cool.

Gretchen:

Ah, nice. It's been quite hot in Albany. Then it suddenly started raining, and now it is quite autumnal here, and I've been enjoying that. I haven't had much time to do as much reading outside of classes. But I have been watching some spooky films and stuff to get into the spirit of October.

Nate:

Nice, anything good?

Gretchen:

Yeah, I've been watching some folk horror sort of films and some BBC plays. One of them that was called "Penda's Fen" was really good.

Nate:

Yeah, cool. I need to get into some of that stuff myself. I've really been watching too many movies lately, but I did see "The Exorcist" in the theater. They were doing like a 50th anniversary type thing. So that was kind of neat.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

The new one or the original?

Nate:

No, no. The original one, yeah.

JM:

Oh, okay. Because there's one that just came out, right?

Nate:

Yeah, I think so.

JM:

"Exorcist Believer" or something like that.

Nate:

Right. Yeah.

JM:

Yeah. It's getting mixed receptions for sure.

Nate:

They typically do, yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Yeah, I have seen a couple of, not the most positive reviews about that, but I haven't seen it myself, so I can't tell.

Nate:

Yeah. I don't know. Gonna definitely check out some horror movies this fall season and maybe even read some more weird horror fiction off-podcast.

JM:

Yes.

Nate:

But yeah, definitely enjoying the change of weather. It was pretty hot here the last time we recorded. And in between recording sessions, I was on vacation in Italy for about 10 days where it was even hotter. So it was nice to have this weather.

But there is some pretty cool stuff that we saw in Italy that I want to mention on the podcast specifically related to Fantascienza. And that if you are ever in Rome, you really need to check out the bookstore, Pocket Duemila or Pocket 2000, because it's this really cool hole in the wall place that has all kinds of neat sci-fi, fantasy,horror related stuff. I saw several original issues of "Diabolik" on the walls.

JM:

Nice.

Nate:

Which you could buy for more money than I wanted to spend. I did pick up three titles of 60s and 70s Italian language science fiction. Namely Gilda Musa and her short story anthology "Festa sull'asteroide" or "Party on the Asteroid". I also got novels by Remo Guerrini, "Pelle d'ombra", ("Shadow Skin"), and Sandro Sandrelli's "Caino dello spazio" or "Cain from Space". So I don't know if we're going to get a chance to do either of the novels on the podcast. They're like a little longer than the stuff we normally cover in English and haven't been translated. But the Gilda Musa stuff, some of the short stories in there are pretty short and seemed acclaimed from Italian critics.

JM:

Yeah, I'd definitely be curious about that. I mean, I always wanted to check out authors through their short stories first. It's such a good format for many of these, I mean, both horror and science fiction, I think, for different reasons, maybe a little bit. For horror it's more like the atmosphere is unbroken and for science fiction, sometimes it's just where you want to express a concept and you want to do it in the most clear and concise way possible. And you don't necessarily have like this big epic story with tons of characters and stuff. You just want to talk about this cool thing. And it's just a perfect use for a short story.

Nate:

Yeah, she's been dead since 1999. So if we do one or two short stories, we'll just claim fair use on the blogspot. So hopefully you guys can read those in English too. But yeah, none of them has been translated in English so far, which is kind of interesting because they're not like, 19th century obscurities or whatever they're from in the 60s and 70s and seem to be fairly prolific authors and well acclaimed. But I guess as we saw as Pestriniero, even some of the more critically acclaimed authors don't really get their due in the English speaking world.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I was thinking about that recording that we did that episode and like how it would be cool to really cover more Italian science fiction after realizing from that episode that I really don't know that much about it. So it would be cool to look into that.

JM:

No, and we really only scratched the surface in our episode back there. And like I mentioned a few names, but mostly I didn't mention them, because they didn't really mean anything to me and they were actually a lot of them.

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah. And my Italian certainly improved since we did the Pestriniero translation process. I'd imagine it would go a little quicker though. That one went pretty easily, I would say, for the translation and time goes. Yeah, I managed to fumble my way through some conversations with the bookstore clerk and he was definitely familiar with Oltre Il Cielo and Urania. So he definitely knows his stuff about the genre.

And speaking of Urania, the other place in Rome that I want to mention is a bookstore/museum called Profondo Rosso or Deep Red. And if you are thinking of the Dario Argento film of the title, you're only kind of half right in that he does have some props and various things from the films in the museum in the basement. The store is half owned by a Luigi Cozzi who is a completely different Italian horror movie director who did films like "Contamination", among others.

JM:

But he also did a really good giallo early on, known in English as "The Killer Must Kill Again."

Nate:

Yeah, right.

JM:

It's a bit sleazy, but it's awesome. It's actually one of my favorite weird gialli. It's not supernatural, but it's got some really neat twists to it that make it stand out, in my opinion.

Nate:

Yeah. He also did some other, I guess, rather silly looking science fiction films and a lot of the posters were all around the store.

JM:

"Starcrash."

Nate:

Yeah, that was the exact one. There's a lot of "Starcrash" merchandise.

JM:

"Starcrash" is actually the first Italian genre film I ever watched.

Nate:

Nice.

JM:

I had no idea it was Italian. I thought there was something weird about it, just the way everybody was speaking. Yeah. But yeah, it's kind of a "Star Wars" knockoff. But according to the original storyboard, it didn't start out that way. It was actually the producers that wanted to push them to be more like "Star War"s. So it's kind of interesting.

Nate:

I guess of direct interest to the podcast and science fiction literature history and all that. Cozzi has written a number of... I'm not sure if they're self-published books or just like on a small print run or whatever, but there is at least, I think, a five volume history of Urania, the magazine.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

At least that's what it implied from the title. I don't know if it's just focusing on the magazine or Italian science fiction in general with Urania being like one of the major players. They're all in Italian language, but they're available from the bookstore's website and they had tons and tons of copies of each one I was there. So it's not like they're running out anytime soon. But if you're interested in getting into the weeds on this stuff, some of the illustrations and photos and magazine covers in particular were pretty cool just flipping through the books seeing translated versions of Astounding, Amazing, and Galaxy in particular was pretty interesting.

JM:

Yeah, they really seemed to like Galaxy magazine according to what I was reading about Urania and stuff.

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah. I also saw a bunch of in both bookstores, Italian translations of Weird Tales stuff. So yeah, a lot of neat stuff there to find for Fantascienza in Rome.

JM:

Yeah, I kind of wish I'd known more about this stuff when my dad and my stepmother were always going to Italy when I was a little bit younger, but he always asked me, do you want me to bring anything back? And I'd be like, well, there's this obscure metal album, but of course he couldn't find it.

Nate:

Right. Right.

JM:

You know, so. Yeah.

Nate:

So yeah, that's what I've been up to. What have you guys been reading for non-podcast stuff? Gretchen, you said you weren't reading too, too much, but anything you guys want to highlight?

Gretchen:

Well, probably would, but as I have been reading a mostly theory that isn't too interesting to hear about, perhaps, I guess, besides that, I have been reading recently "Chocky" by John Wyndham. I'm almost finished with it, and it's the fourth book I've read by Wyndham so far. I've read "The Midwich Cuckoos", "The Chrysalids" and "Day of the Triffids". This is the fourth time I've been experiencing him. I think it's a pretty good novel so far. I believe it's his last before he died. And I would definitely be interested in looking at him at some point on the podcast.

JM:

I definitely have some of his titles out on the list. I remember writing down specifically "The Trouble with Lichen" because it's supposed to be a fairly early example of a competent woman scientist in science fiction. And there's also "The Kraken Wakes", I think I have written down. I basically wrote down a couple of the lesser known titles because I didn't really want to do "Day of the Triffids" again because I don't know, everybody talks about that one. It's actually not my favorite.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I was about to say that's probably my least favorite of the ones I've read. I enjoy "Midwich Cuckoos" and "Chrysalids" more, and so far "Chocky" as well. Besides that, it's the third time I've started reading Zelazny's "Night in the Lonesome October", which has become a sort of tradition to read it every October and yeah, it's a really great book. I just really love the way Zelazny focuses on all these different horror icons and every time I reread it, I come across like references I didn't catch the first time. So it's a really, a really neat read.

Nate:

Yeah, that's a hаllmark of a great book is something that you can get a different thing out of each time you read it. Both authors I definitely would like to cover on the podcast at some point.

JM:

Yeah, Zelazny for sure. I mean, probably not that book unless we want to do a October bonus episode at some point, but like...

Gretchen:

Some later Halloween special.

Nate:

Yeah, it's not out of the question for sure.

JM:

He's got a lot of good science fiction. Definitely been thinking about what "Rose for Ecclesiastes" and "Lord of Light" and a couple of other books that he made that are just really awesome that we could do on the podcast. "Night in the Lonesome October" is something both Gretchen and I discovered a couple years ago and it's this really unusual, very heartwarming love letter to the horror genre that I think we might have mentioned on the podcast last year. I can't remember.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, it's just a really, it's actually kind of an interesting connection with this episode in that it's almost like fanwank, but in a cool way, you know, it's like, it's like, if you're a fan, you will get this book and you probably won't hate it because it's just like, a lot of the time that kind of stuff is too self-referential and I kind of get annoyed. It's like, oh, if you've seen this movie, you get what I'm talking about. I'm like, yeah, it's just, it's just really annoying to read.

Nate:

We're not going to be covering "Ready Player One" on the podcast, so rest easy, everybody.

JM:

But Zelazny just does it so well and he's so like obviously passionate about this stuff, but he also has his own style and his own like way of really wittily delivering dialogue and like the point of view characters are really interesting because it's like a dog who's a familiar of Jack the Ripper and you know, he's like basically gets to walk around with Jack while he does all this stuff, but he's also like a mathematician kind of and he has to calculate where the gateway is going to open to let extra dimensional elder beings in and this whole idea of the two opposing forces, the ones who want to open the gate at the end of October and the ones who want to keep the gate closed because they like the way the world is now and they don't necessarily want to allow the Lovecraftian elder beings into the universe and part of the mystery is having to guess who's on what side because that's what Snuff, the dog protagonist has to kind of guess.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I really like throughout the the novel, it's sort of kind of drops you right into it. So you get the plot throughout and the world built throughout which is pretty cool.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah, it's so much fun and there's some pretty good illustrations I guess to that fun to look at. But I've been reading another cool October thing and I've actually been really getting into the short stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes. And he's a British writer who I guess had his moment of popularity in mostly the 70s. He seems to be pretty much forgotten now and I discovered him because of the stories in the Amicus anthologies, "From Beyond the Grave" and "The Monster Club" are based on his stories. And I'm really, really enjoying them like they're really original kind of they like he likes to make use of them sort of some of the traditional horror tropes and monsters, but he does it in a really interesting novel way and the writing is good. The monsters are usually kind of sympathetic. Sometimes they're up to no good, but you're kind of on their side a lot of the time. And I think that's kind of cool. And some of the creatures he pulls up aren't what you would expect. Like he has this really cool story called "Lord Dunwilliam and the Cwn Annwn", which is about a Welsh legend of hellhound-like creatures. And there's vampires, there's gorgons in one story. There's a sentient house that likes to eat people. There's all kinds of really cool stuff. And it's great. And I'm loving this collected stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, basically finally arranged in chronological order from like the mid sixties to the mid or late eighties. And yeah, it's just great October reading. Really, really, really good stories.

Nate:

Yeah, I've been reading a couple of very, I guess, non October things since last time. I actually have done some non audio book reading for the first time in a while podcast, I finish up the first anthology of Conan stories, "The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian", which is just a lot of fun and just like totally awesome stuff. Really well put together anthologies with tons of neat bonus material in the forms of unfinished summaries and drafts and initial versions as well as like maps and appendices of various places and Howard's notes on the world and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely really well put together edition there.

JM:

I love a lot of the stories.

Nate:

Yeah, they're a lot of fun.

JM:

"Tower of the Elephant" and "Rogues in the House" probably being my two favorite ones.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

"Tower of the Elephant" is even kind of a science fiction story.

Nate:

There's definitely elements in a couple for sure.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

Maybe that's something that we can bring on a bonus episode at some point because Howard was definitely very much a Weird Tales celebrity as I think we'll see and maybe this episode I think very much adorned by the same people who are reading Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and, you know, just only a hop skip and a jump away from science fiction.

JM:

I think the big difference with Howard though is that he's very much a pulp adventure writer.

Nate:

Oh yeah.

JM:

Even when he's writing a horror story, it kind of follows the adventure pattern. More so than Lovecraft or Smith. It's really, you know, about people having to overcome monsters and sorcery and stuff often with the strength of their muscles. But not always, you know. Sometimes Howard does surprise you a little bit at times with some very melancholic moving pieces of writing.

Nate:

Yeah. He's a good writer.

JM:

Yeah. I mean, there's also some unfortunate stuff like that, anthology includes the undeniably worst Conan story, "The Vale of Lost Women".

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

But I don't know. Poor guy, you know, he's like 30 years old when he blew his head off and never traveled anywhere. Yeah. You know, it's just really, really poor Texas town. I don't know. I kind of, I feel sorry for him almost. I feel like he would have outgrown some of that stuff probably if he actually had a chance to live a little longer and see, see a bit of the places that he liked to write about so much.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Because he's wrote a lot of historical fiction too. But yeah.

Nate:

Even the imperfections in some of those stories aren't nearly as bad as some of the other stuff we've even looked at on the podcast.

So the other thing that I read non-audio book is kind of related to stuff that we've done on the podcast in that it is the play "Cyrano de Bergerac" by Edmond Rostand. And the play's probably more well known than Bergerac's works.

JM:

And Bergerac himself. Yeah.

Nate:

But it's a really fun play, fast moving, and there's tons of witty dialogue from Bergerac, the character. And there's even some pretty subtle references to his moon voyage story. So I thought that was kind of neat.

JM:

And there's quite a bit of dueling.

Nate:

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the first act in particular, it kind of, it's like a chaotic theater scene where all kinds of stuff is going on and he's just like a loudmouth insulting everybody with these really witty and cutting remarks. Pretty entertaining. Definitely wouldn't mind seeing a performance of it someday.

Audio book stuff, I've been doing, again, rereads like I normally do with audio books. I did DH Lawrence's "The Rainbow". I've read most of DH Lawrence's major works. I've read "The Rainbow", "Women in Love", "Lady Chatterley's Lover", and, uh Sons and...

Gretchen:

"Sons and Lovers?"

Nate:

Sons and Lovers. Yeah. Yeah. I think "The Rainbow" is my favorite out of all those. But I don't know, on this reread, I didn't like it as much nearly as I did when I first read it. It's really disjointed in that it does feel like four or five different short stories kind of pasted together, but there are some really nice prose sections in it. The main issue with DH Lawrence is that he has a lot of sexual hangups and he really was eager to tell you all about them, which, I don't know, makes some parts of it...

JM:

Which got him into some trouble and kind of makes him stand out from some of his fellows, I guess.

Nate:

Definitely. Yeah. I mean, he's definitely one of the first authors to write about it in that fashion.

JM:

In English.

Nate:

Yeah, in English, that's right.

JM:

I mean, across the channel, those evil, subversive French people were doing it like a hundred years before.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

But you know.

Gretchen:

The decadents.

JM:

Right.

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Generally, overall, I like it. I didn't really care for "Women in Love". That's probably my least favorite out of the ones that I've read. But that one seems to be more acclaimed than "The Rainbow" for whatever reason. I don't know. I'm not really in any rush to revisit that one.

But after that, I did Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", which, again, I really didn't like when I first read it, but I just wasn't into it at all this time when I re-read it. I don't know. Thomas Hardy writes all these doomed love triangle tragedy stories and knowing the plot and how it's going to go, it just really felt like a miserable slog kind of getting through it. His prose is fine, I guess. But some of the tragic moments just felt so over-the-top ridiculous that they were kind of unintentionally funny in places.

JM:

That's what they would call "misery porn" nowadays.

Nate:

Yeah, right. Exactly, yeah.

Gretchen:

I know that "Jude the Obscure" is often called that, or the rest of his work's very similar in that sense.

Nate:

Yeah, "Jude" is definitely. I've read five of his works. So I've read those two, "Jude the Obscure", "Tess", as well as "Mayor of Casterbridge", "Return of the Native", and "Far From the Madding Crowd", and they all have their moments of that. I'm probably not going to revisit or do any more Hardy. I just wasn't really into it, and since "Tess" was the one that I thought was the best out of those to begin with, I think I might be done with him. But...

JM:

I really liked "Tess" when I read it, too, but I don't know, yeah, I actually did think about recently how I would feel now. There's this person on YouTube, her name is Jennifer Brooks, and she's one of the few people that actually, I guess they call it, the Booktube community, but she's one of the few people that mostly discusses classics and not only 19th century stuff, but older stuff as well. She's really into Renaissance period stuff, and she was talking about some of her least favorite Victorian novels recently, and she mentioned, I think it was "Jude the Obscure", and she talked about a bunch of other Thomas Hardy as well, and "Tess" came up, and I remember thinking how much I liked that one, and then I kind of thought, but now that I'm not 19 anymore, I wonder if I would really like it as much, just like, you know, I just, I don't know, I just kind of thought about, maybe I would like to revisit it someday, but I do remember it being like, just crushingly downbeat, you know, like...

Nate:

Yeah, it definitely is. There's a couple moments of levity at some parts. There's one scene in particular that reminds me of a scene from "Napoleon Dynamite" where the cow wanders into the onion patch, but yeah, aside from that, it's just kind of, I don't know, it was tough going, I thought.

Hardy is probably at the bottom of the pile for my Victorians, but I don't know. He's not bad, it's just, I like pretty much everybody else better from that whole scene.

Gretchen:

I haven't read either Hardy or Lawrence, although I remember that a professor at my university actually did a course a few semesters ago on both of them at the same time, so it's interesting that you were reading them also around the same time.

Nate:

Yeah, they definitely both clog up the thrift stores a lot with the books. I guess Hardy's interesting in that Wessex is one of those shared world universe type novels where, I don't know if the characters pop up, but certainly the place names do from novel to novel.

JM:

Yeah, he actually created a made up county in England, Wessex, and that's like where most of the stories take place, and it's like, it's kind of thing that if you're not actually familiar with English counties, you might be like, oh, that's a real place. Right.

Nate:

Yeah. I think Lawrence overall is definitely a better prose stylist than Hardy is, but they definitely have some interesting things about them. I don't know. I liked them more when I initially read them.

JM:

So to come full circle, he actually has a story featured in the sequel anthology to "The Dark Descent", "The Foundations of Fear", which includes some really good stories, including some that I want to do on the podcast, one by Frederik Pohl, who's going to come up during this episode.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

The story in there is, I think it's called "Barbara of the House of Grebe" or something like that. It looks really interesting, kind of thinking, yeah, maybe taking that it would be easier than some of his longer work again, right, like maybe the shorter form is better.

Nate:

Yeah. I think it might be for him because I mean, he doesn't write the thousand page doorstops that Dickens did, but even after like 250 pages, you're like, all right, enough, I get it already.

JM:

Enough. Yeah. But it's just really fascinating to me that in some of these like really cool, massive anthologies, you can find writers like Thomas Hardy standing next to Frederik Pohl and Harlan Ellison and stuff like that.

Nate:

Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Same with the original "Dark Descent". Henry James next to Stephen King and all that.

So after the Hardy, I did "Catch-22", which I just finished up for this recording, which is still a lot of fun. There are some unfortunate sexist passages in the book that don't really age that well, but overall it's still a little fun.

JM:

That's one I definitely want to read. Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

That's one. I actually, I read that back in middle school on my own just because I read a lot of books that I think I would appreciate a lot more now and it's been one I've wanted to reread because I recently have been watching the series "MASH".

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

And I know that a lot of people kind of compare it with this kind of drama and comedy and the war satire. So I thought I should probably read it again at some point.

Nate:

Yeah. It's definitely a good entry in that post-war satire of this absurdity of war. I mean, there's so many entries you could point to, "Stalag 17", "Dr. Strangelove", "MASH". You name it. But I mean, it's a really good entry in that whole genre, I think.

JM:

Neat. Yeah. I mean, let me know if you decide to re-read it, Gretchen, because I'd like to read it, so maybe I'll read it at the same time. But Gretchen, if you want to throw in something else, I actually, I don't know about making this section go on too long, but there were a couple of other things I wanted to mention that I've been reading. So if you wanted to add something, I'll finish up.

Gretchen:

Well, besides that, I ended up rereading two different books for one of my classes that I read for the same professor a few semesters ago. He just really likes those books, I suppose, which were Daniel Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Year" and "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood. I definitely did enjoy both of them a little more than the first time, especially the Defoe. And I think maybe reading it alongside some of the theory that we've been reading, I kind of was a little more in tune with some of the ideas of the course. So I did enjoy those. And we also read "Oroonoko" by Aphra Behn, which I also enjoyed. All three of those works were interesting. The two, it was interesting to revisit. So that's been kind of the fictional reading I've done, besides all the Foucault and people talking about Foucault mostly.

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah, I have "Oroonoko" slated sometimes soon because it's like a really short book and I figured it would take not that long to get through. 

Gretchen:

It's pretty good.

Nate:

I haven't read the Defoe. We were debating doing that, I think maybe in the early days of the podcast, just because it isn't like an early apocalypse type story, but haven't read that particular one. I have read "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders", which, you know, they're pretty cool. Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I've read "Robinson Crusoe" and "Journal of the Plague Year". I haven't read "Moll Flanders" though.

Nate:

It's one of those ones that has like a paragraph long title that just tells you the entire plot of the book.

JM:

Yeah, it's kind of like the "Symzonia" chapter title.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know. I remember talking about it a little bit in a "Journal of the Plague Years" in my science fiction class, but I don't think we ever read it and I read "Robinson Crusoe" on my own years before and I would visit it again someday, maybe because I was pretty young and also "Moll Flanders", which, you know, it's one of those things like I'm always, I'm always there for the beginnings. I'm always in, I'm always ready for what anybody has to say to me. But I think as the book went on, I started to get a little bit tired of it by the end. It's one of these like, I have to repent of all my dark ways and like being a prostitute is ungodly and all that, and like, I don't know, I guess maybe I missed the point. I probably did, but I didn't really, I didn't like it that much. But it was an interesting read. I mean, it's supposed to, it's considered one of the very first true English novels, I guess. So, yeah.

But I didn't read anything quite so literary actually, since we did the last podcast as well as my usual diet of short stories, I've actually read three novels, all quite short. But the one I guess that I'll get out of the way first is my first exposure to the really trashy 70s and 80s writer Guy N. Smith. A British writer, most famous for a series of books about killer crabs. "Night of the Crabs" and all its sequels.

This book, though, is called "Fiend", and it's just kind of a randomly one that I picked. It was published, I believe, in 1988. It's kind of interesting because it takes place entirely in Moscow in the then still existent Soviet Union, but it's supposed to be somewhere in the near future. The leader of the Soviet dies and the political leaders decide they can't afford for him to die yet because there's supposed to be this big international conference coming up in Geneva and he needs to be there, he's supposed to be disarming the rest of the world and making them like Russia kind of thing. So they decide to press gang this very unwilling occultist character into resurrecting him and bringing him back to life. And of course things don't go well, and the person that comes back to life in the body of the former leader is not actually him, but some terrible tyrannical figure from Russian history, who I won't mention because it's only revealed by the end of the book, as I guess it'd be a spoiler.

It was pretty fun. It was really sleazy and over the top. There's a lot of really questionable stuff in this book, but I kind of enjoyed it up to the end. I think the end was very abrupt and just kind of like, oh, you know, I did my word count now and I think I'm just going to finish up, like I'm just kind of just destroy everything in a blaze of glory at the end kind of thing. And it was kind of after the book had reached its peak of uncomfortable sleaze factor. And you know, it's just like, okay, it's time to end it now. And I guess I agreed.

So I had fun with it. There were some really creative, crazy things that happened. Person getting turned into a dog and like weird creative ways that this monstrous, special, undead, unstoppable figure had of killing his enemies and stuff like that. It was pretty, it was pretty creative. Not great three out of five kind of material, I guess, but I enjoyed it.

I also read "Gladiator" by Philip Wylie, which is a book from 1930 that is supposed to be a precursor to Superman and stuff like that. I'm not really into comic stuff. I don't like the Marvel universe or the DC universe or anything like that. I don't, I have no connections with that. So just taking this book on its own terms, though, I really enjoyed it a lot. It was way more existential than I guess I expected it to me. I mean, like, I guess that's kind of a matter of course now, you know, now you're supposed to be like, oh, your heroes are not that heroic. And like, you know, you get like the "Dark Knight" and all that stuff kind of like trying to psychoanalyze Batman and all that and like, it's kind of par for the course now.

But this guy is basically his father is a mad scientist, and he decides to inject his wife with these special hormones that essentially give their son unmatchable strength and he can do anything. Mentally, he's a normal young man, but physically, there's basically nothing he can't accomplish. And you would think that would be like, oh, okay, well, that's your book then, I guess, right? But the book is basically him stuck in this really difficult position because he's kind of been brought up with these values that he's supposed to try his best and he's supposed to like be accomplished at things in life. And yet he's also not supposed to show how powerful he is because if he does that, he's obviously greater than everyone else and nobody will, everybody will be afraid of him and stuff like that.

And he actually does a really good job of like, he goes into the First World War and he fights in the French-born legion. And he sees a lot of really, really terrible stuff. There's some real punch the air scenes where he like has to free himself from police custody and he like teaches the police this incredible, incredible lesson about how they should be behaving basically, and it's really good. And the end is kind of tragic. You can kind of see that it's going that way. So I wasn't really surprised, but it's yeah, I thought it was really effective. It was really good and definitely something that I would say, even though it's not very science fiction, definitely enough that, you know, it's something that maybe in the future one day we consider doing on the podcast because it's, it's a pretty effective story. And yeah, nothing at all to do with the other "Gladiator", the Ridley Scott one. But yeah, it's "Gladiator" from 1930.

And finally, the last one I read, and this was really neat. I read this 1950s French novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet called "The Erasers", and it was just kind of this existential weird take on the detective story, basically a deconstruction of the detective story. Normally, I would expect a book like this to be very funny and satirical. And while it did have its moments like that, it was actually quite dark. And yeah, it was like this police inspector who's trying to solve a murder that hasn't actually been committed, but the police don't know that the murder hasn't actually happened because they can't find the body. So there's a lot of like commentary on bureaucracy and on the stupidity of procedure and stuff like that.

There's one really funny character who's always like making right comments about everything. And the police inspector who's kind of a lead character is really bumbling through everything, really has no idea what he's doing. Every time something doesn't go just the way he's expecting it to, he starts getting tongue tied and stuttering and he can't really get anything out and like always getting distracted. It's like the opposite of what you'd expect from a detective novel, basically. And I really enjoyed it. I thought it was great. I'd love to read more of his stuff. Apparently, he's pretty well known in film circles. He co-wrote the film "Last Night in Marienbad" and also directed a bunch of films of his own. And that's my reading for the last little while.

Nate:

All right, cool. Well, I guess before we get into tonight's episode, which if you haven't guessed already, is going to be a little bit looser in format and structure than our normal episodes.

But you can find us on Twitter or X or whatever at ChronomnautsSF. And you can also check out our original translations and hard to find stories on our blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com, where we have posted a new story of an S. Belsky's "Under the Comet", which is a neat apocalypse story. And more will be coming in the future.

You can find our episodes on all the major podcast platforms as well as  YouTube, where we post them shortly after they go up on Spotify and Google and all that stuff.

(music: low arpeggiated synth)

personal histories with fandom

Nate:

So for tonight's episode, we are going to be taking a look at early science fiction fandom, early science fiction fanzines, and the fiction that was published in these fanzines. It's kind of an interesting, unique phenomenon that happens here, specifically in America in Britain in the 1930s of the rise of an organized community of fans. Before the 1930s, we had kind of isolated reading groups and clubs here and there, as well as a dedicated Sherlock Holmes fan base. But I think it's pretty easy to say that there was really nothing else in the world quite like what emerged in the 1930s in the form of tons and tons of fanzines as well as science fiction conventions that people would actually travel across the country to go meet up with other science fiction fans and not just kind of a correspondence reading club. So a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, and it really sets the model for how the community and fandom operates to this very day. So before we get into the history, why don't we all discuss for a bit our own personal histories of fandom, be it science fiction or something else?

Gretchen:

My experience with fandom, especially even when I just first started getting into it, was more of the fandom centered around specific pieces of media. I'd say that even though I'm, and I'm sure some people might not, you know, don't crucify me or anything, but I am not the biggest enjoyer of "Star Wars" now, but when I was younger I was really into it and went to like a convention for it, and that was probably the first real like experience I had with like other fans outside of like immediate friends and family. And it was after that that I got into "Doctor Who" and "Star Trek", and that's when I started to kind of get into more of the online fan bases. I have read some fan fiction, I have a lot of friends who regularly read and write fan fiction as well. And typically I think that there are a lot of people who still sort of view fan fiction as something that's more related to romance or erotica, and there's definitely a fair share of that. There's a lot of that, but it is a wide array and I have read quite a bit that I have enjoyed. And you know, I know like some people do write a lot in certain areas for "Star Trek" and for "Man From Uncle" as well. So I guess as someone who has been born in the 2000s, the early 2000s, I guess the internet is where I really have experienced most of fandom.

Nate:

Yeah, it's pretty much been the dominant form of communication since at least the early 90s when I got into fandom, though not science fiction and literary fandom, but more like underground metal fandom, as far as like talking to people through Usenet and IRC and just checking out all the websites there which turned into tape trading and then getting older issues of fanzines. And then later on in the, I guess as the internet age progresses, downloading digital versions of said fanzines when that stuff circulates more through the online sphere.

I didn't really get too much into media and science fiction fandom until a lot later. I got really into "Dark Shadows" maybe 10 years ago or so and really the only people talking about "Dark Shadows" nowadays are the "Dark Shadows" fans and fandom just because the series itself is kind of really overwhelming to anybody but a dedicated fan. Everybody else is going to slog through a thousand episodes of something or just kind of casually watch a show where it's intended to be a endless serial. There's really no plot resolution of any kind and continuity goes out the window with the whims of the writers.

Gretchen:

I wanted to say that I did check it out once I have heard about "Dark Shadows" and when you said that you were a fan I looked it up and I remembered seeing oh there's one season available and then realizing that there were about 400, 500 episodes in that one season and thought maybe I'll wait on that a little bit.

JM:

I've never watched the show but I've listened to a few of the audios and they are designed so that you can just sort of pick up, they're designed that you don't have to have watched the TV show to really get into them I think. I think they might repeat some key plot points from certain episodes perhaps maybe I'm not totally sure about that but I feel like that might be the case like there's some characters in there that seem to have significance beyond what they appear to in the audios but like it's still not enough to make you lost really in my experience so far anyway.

Nate:

Yeah and they change continuity all the time so when you meet the character of Josette she's a ghost and the events of how she became a ghost they change like three different times during the course of the series. I don't know if they expected the audience just like, wouldn't remember or they themselves forgot or what but...

JM:

I couldn't tell you exactly it was a while ago when I listened to them and I don't remember if that character is present or not but they do have a lot of the original cast members.

Nate:

Yeah, which is cool.

JM:

Yeah, now some of them have died in the last several years so they've definitely slowed down on the production of "Dark Shadows" audios but yeah.

Nate:

If you're looking for an introduction to the series watch the "House of Dark Shadows" film they just basically took the most popular arc, the Barnabas story, which itself is just a knockoff of "Dracula" and just made that into a standalone movie it kind of gives you all the vibe and the characters it feels like a very American version of a Hammer horror film.

JM:

Interesting.

Nate:

Yeah but that was kind of my experience in getting into fandom before we've done the podcast which has certainly been a whole different experience as far as that goes.

JM:

So I actually got a little bit into fandom when I was a child in the late 80s specifically "Doctor Who" fandom I joined what was called the Doctor Who Information Network and it was semi local. There were some chapters in other provinces and states but a lot of it was the people were kind of in the Ontario area. They had a few convention events nothing too large scale but one or two lasted for two days and that was pretty incredible. I have to say we're going to give another shout out to my dad who I've mentioned a few times on the podcast already but he was a real trooper. I couldn't read the magazine so he read the bi-monthly fan publication that the zine that DWIN put out which included actually it was really interesting doing this episode because it brought back a lot of that stuff to me I hadn't thought about in a long time but the way the club was run definitely seemed similar to away a lot of these 1930s fan groups were operating and presumably kept operating for several decades.

The magazine was a mixture of stuff about the show but also about fan activities in general and in general, not being a very social kid it was the first thing that interested me more than the second. Unfortunately I still find that to be the case reading through some of this stuff was kind of exhausting for me not so much the zine excerpts but like the details of their feuds and the different things that I wanted to add a little bit. But it was really, you know, it was interesting I enjoyed the conventions I mean I made a couple of friends from the group that were kind of my own age especially starting when we went into high school, I was hanging out with a couple of local "Doctor Who" friends who were also part of the club and that were my age and you know we'd get together at somebody's house on Saturday night and watch Doctor Who till like five in the morning or something like that drink lots of soda.

So yeah that was kind of it. I mean you know I liked learning about you know a lot of people were very knowledgeable about the other media that I didn't know so much about. Especially the books and stuff like that because I didn't get to read a lot of those till later and yeah I started reading "Asimov's Science Fiction" magazine also around that time and this would have been 1990 probably, 89, 90 and it was a bit too young to be reading some of the stuff in there, for sure, but nevertheless it was interesting because I took notice of certain things like every issue started with an editorial. There was a letters column and at the end they would have book reviews and other miscellany like if the Hugo or Nebula Awards were coming up they would talk about those and that was the first time I really became aware that there was actually a science fiction literature community out there. I'd never been aware that such a thing even existed so it was quite a revelation I think.

The music fandom I did get into a bit as well but I think for me it was different. By then the internet was around and certainly my dad was not going to be reading Slayer Magazine to me or anything like that. Luckily around 1996, there was already quite a lot of internet resources, but I was watching a video on Heavy Metallurgy recently and Marty is one of the former editors of Metal Maniacs from back in the day was saying that, seemingly metal like the internet was something that was embraced by the metal community earlier than a lot of other scenes, and people just really seemed to use it as a vehicle to trade and talk about underground bands and stuff like that. I don't know if I you know I mean again like I felt a little bit detached from it but not that much because I was kind of obsessed with it for a while there so it's kind of like you know really into finding the obscure block metal bands and stuff like that, and reading really bad scans of old interviews with Beherit and stuff like that.

Nate:

Yeah reading the fanzines for this episode definitely was a similar experience to reading some of the fanzines from the 80s like Slayer Magazine or Blackthorn or things like that where it's like all the big names are here when they're all teenagers it's like all these people would go in to form important bands or write important novels but here they are as 14, 15 year old kids, to talk about how much they love this stuff and it's kind of a really charming and fascinating look at the whole.

JM:

It is yeah. So long as they're not fighting.

Nate:

Which I guess happens a surprising amount and over very silly reasons.

Gretchen:

Yeah even today there's quite a bit of that I've seen in some fandoms so.

Nate:

Yeah I was just looking at a Twitter argument today about YA fiction, and how it's a marketing genre not a real literary genre and people were all pissed off and all that stuff so.

JM:

What is that going on now?

Nate:

X or, Twitter or whatever people always are saying something on that website.

JM:

Yeah, yeah, arguing about stupid stuff.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I don't really use Twitter it kind of scares me a bit.

Nate:

Yeah, I think we need a better alternative for our podcast social media stuff but I don't really know what that is at this point in time. I don't know Blue Sky and Mastodon are not really quite there yet I guess we'll take a look at.

JM:

It's pretty small fry at this point, and I'm not like you know I mean I'm not necessarily an early adopter for a lot of things, you know it's just like there doesn't seem a lot of point but yeah whatever.

Gretchen:

I have spent most of my time on Tumblr which is where I'm able to sort of just curate the stuff that I see so I don't have to worry about any arguments going on.

Nate:

Yeah definitely, I mean maybe we should start a Tumblr page for the podcast and do that instead of the Twitter. Who knows maybe the people there are a little bit more engaging, certainly a lot of media fandom on Tumblr that's for sure.

(music: Ferdinand Wagner - "Little Jupiter; Polka schnell" on bright synth)

1930s fandom history and fanzine excerpts

JM:

So what really struck me though one of the things that struck me is just how little things seem to have really changed. And also a lot of the things we were speculating about, I think some of them some of our questions got answered. I remember early on and also while I was reading Brian Aldiss' still excellent "Trillion Year Spree" and I think the book is excellent, mostly because of both the somewhat obscure titles it mentions, but also Aldiss, is he definitely has a unique point of view and he's very articulate. And I enjoy his sense of humor. Very dry, but very British. I don't know, I like it a lot. But I don't agree with him on a lot of things, I think, at this point. And that's fine. One of the things, you know, he kind of accuses science fiction fans of attempting to rope in all kinds of stuff that are precursors to the genre. And basically saying, oh, yeah, this is, we claim this now as ours. This is science fiction, right?

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

Well, it seems that back in the early thirties, some of these quite young people were well read enough to be doing that themselves.

Nate:

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So why don't we get into that? 

So we're going to be talking a little bit about the fandom and fan community from 1930 to 1939. Specifically, using 1939 as a cutoff date as our next episode, we'll be focusing very specifically on one point of time in 1939, namely July, when we're going to be taking a look at an issue of Astounding Stories. But it also coincidentally happens to be the same month that the first Worldcon was held. So we're going to kind of end it on one of the major events in fandom history.

I guess the questions of what is fandom or what is fan fiction seem almost as complex and nebulous as the question of what is science fiction, in that as long as there has been storytelling, there have always been instances of people basing their works off of the creations of others. Which gets at the heart of Western literature itself if we start digging into the implications of the Homeric question, in that many scholars feel that the two works were written by two different people, perhaps 50 years apart. Butler thinks the author of "The Odyssey" was a woman, you know, who knows.

Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, we see biblically inspired works like Dante and Milton, and even getting into the 19th century genre writing with works we've covered on the podcast. We see established authors like Jules Verne finishing up Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym", or Garrett Serviss writing his sequel to "War of the Worlds", that is "Edison's Conquest of Mars". Anne Jamison in her book, "Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World", notes several of these fun 19th century anecdotes, like George Eliot and William Thackeray both writing Walter Scott fan fiction. In Eliot's case, it was when she was a little girl, she had to return a borrowed book and wrote her own ending before she read the real one. In Thackeray's case, it was because he was dissatisfied with the ending of "Ivanhoe", so he wrote his own sequel, "Rebecca and Rowena", which is apparently supposed to be pretty satirical and funny like a lot of his other works are.

JM:

There was something I found out a while ago, there was a writer that I was kind of looking at, because his name keeps coming up, especially in apocalyptic fiction, but in other stuff too, Sydney Fowler Wright, who is a British writer from the, I guess, early 20th century, up to the 50s probably, and he actually wrote a lot of science fiction. But he also wrote, he finished Walter Scott's book. Oh shoot, I forgot the name. It's something that he's submitted at the end of his life and the publisher said it was unpublishable, so they tried to kind of hide it. And he basically was one of the people who was lucky enough to read the manuscript and I guess he did a version of it that says finished. And he's actually written a pretty comprehensive bio on Walter Scott as well. So funny how his name keeps coming up, it came up a lot in the Twain episode.

Nate:

No, it's certainly influential in a lot of ways. But regarding the fan fiction and the, I guess, transition from isolated incidents and cases like this into more of a movement is that Jamison notes that this stuff really takes off with Sherlock Holmes, especially after Doyle kills the character of Holmes off, as people want to read more Sherlock Holmes stories and if Sherlock Holmes is dead, well, people can't really do that. But established magazines like Punch published a number of stories under the title "The Adventures of Picklock Holes", presumably a humorous take on the character I haven't read any of those, but it does sound ridiculous.

JM:

And we can also read about the adventures of his friend Sir Goodlock Homer.

Nate:

Yeah. But when all these kinds of stories were published, if they were published, they were published in professionally produced books or magazines. From what I can tell there wasn't really much that resembled fanzines prior to the 1930s. That is, magazines independently produced by fans and for fans. Jamison does note one adorable newspaper that the Brontes circulated amongst their family, but something where only one or two copies is produced I think is a different scale than an independent publication that is circulating to a few dozen or 100 people.

I tried to follow up on some pre 1930s leads there certainly publications before 1930 that sound like they could be fanzines from their titles. The biggest one is Lovecraft, and publishing in The Homebrew Journal, but from what I can tell that one and a couple of the other ones I looked at were all professionally published magazines.

So what happens in the 1930s that sees the appearance of these dozens of fanzines?

I do want to trace briefly a few factors leading up to that point. So the first obvious one is the increasing proliferance of pulp magazines themselves from the stuff like the Munsey pulps that would publish genre fiction, broadly construed, to the launch of Amazing in 1926 that was specifically focused on scientifiction. The increasing publication of these kinds of stories and various magazines led to the establishment of reading clubs and collectors. So I want to read this one piece from the Terrestrial Fantascience Guild Bulletin, which was published in May 1935, edited by an E.E. Evert, and Evert is the writer of this piece.

So he says, "Come this Sept. 6th, 26 years ago (that is in 1909 for the modern podcast listener) a young fellow had an idea. Nothing unusual in itself, but it spelled the formation of the grandfather of the present TFG. The name of this young fellow was Arnold Evert, the father of our present editor. Mr Evert, with three of his friends had long hogged the few "impossible stories" that appeared in the old Argosy and All-Story of those days, it had been hard for money was scarce. So with these three friends he set out to organize the IMPOSSIBLE STORY GUILD. Main purpose to pool all money for buying magazines and books. 

"Things progressed, the library grew. New members appeared. Until in 1914, the membership read 31, and these came from all over the world. England contributed one: N.E.P. North, Italy one: Ivan Nepolis (who moved to the US after the war) and Canada one B. Murdock (deceased). All these youngsters ranged around 20 years of age when the US entered the war. Many went. And through all this trying time, correspondence was kept up. Friends were made overseas. North became a Captain and three members were killed. The war ended the remainder returned to take up the old treads which had almost been broken. 

"In 1920 the membership numbered 40. A regular and very large correspondence was kept up, concerning the magazines as well as general scientific subjects. Most of the members were then mature adults, but some of the younger fellows began to creep in. It was in 1926, with the appearance that the ISG made a definite re-organization. A convention was held, and it was moved and passed that now as there was something definite to work on that the club should be reorganized. The original members were all gone leaving the club sitll at 40. But these 40 had familys and jobs and live work to do, so it was then that the club came into the present hands. Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Evert, Mr. Woe, Mr. Sabin, and Mr. Nepolis, as well as Mr. Wollheim. In 1928, came the change of the name to INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE FICTION GUILD, for a while we were satisfied with our organization as it stood, but about a year ago we decided to do at it RIGHT. 

"In this little over a year the guild has grown as nothing else ever has! Our membership reaches around the world, and not in name only, correspondence is regular and the membership lists increase with the same regularity. The Bulletin was started and grew with the Guild. Reorganization was again made to fit our needs. Issues were brought to a point and all in all the TFG has done lots. But this is only hte beginning We are only finding ourselves. As for the future. Who knows? It is very bright."

So presumably readership clubs like this sprung up in various places and while the Impossible Story Guild early on was largely US focused, it did have some international members. This zine in particular was published in Alabama, but as mentioned a Mr. Wollheim, much more on him in a bit, was a leading figure by the 1920s who was based out of New York.

The third piece I briefly want to focus on is the technological angle. These scenes were primarily mimeographed and hectographed and while the technology for both dates back to the 1800s, by the 1930s they became widely used in various circumstances for production of small run newsletters.

Hectographing is the process of creating an ink jelly-like master, basically a pan of gelatin that you press a piece of paper onto. Whereas mimeographing is an actual machine that pushes ink through a stencil. Both of these techniques would fall out of favor by the 1960s when photocopying comes into the picture, but in the 1930s they were the dominant method of production. Hectographing would produce much smaller runs and in lower quality, often leading to the smudging of inks which sometimes makes reading them in 2023 a bit of a challenge.

JM:

Yeah, so a lot of this stuff you can get now, but it doesn't look pristine I suppose.

Nate:

No, not always. But yeah, there's a massive, massive fanzine archive of this stuff dating back to 1930 and going up to the present on the Fan History Project website, which at the time I wrote this script, boasted of 21,483 issues consisting of over 380,000 pages. We will post a link to the chronological list of fanzines in the episode description here, so you can check it out for yourself, but this stuff is absolutely fantastic to dig through.

JM:

Quite a historical archive.

Nate:

It really is, and it's just really a snapshot in time in a way that I guess is even more so in some ways than the stories themselves.

JM:

Right, and I remember commenting on this when we were doing the Amazing episode about exactly a year ago, and we were looking at the letters. And I remember just being way more taken than I was expecting by the letter section. Now, to be honest, like, yeah, they probably picked, like, they probably didn't print everything, you know, they probably just picked letters that they thought would be good to print for one reason or another.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

So, I don't know, like, I'm not saying I'm not saying like the quality in the professional magazines was necessarily always the best. But I definitely was, I guess, really struck by that because you were seeing things like our authors contributing, and people like Jack Williamson, who apparently wrote a lot of letters. He doesn't really come up too much in this, and his name is mentioned a few times. It seemed his involvement and fandom in the early days was kind of sporadic, but he does talk about a lot of this stuff in his biography a little bit as well.

Nate:

Yeah, and it's incredible the amount of documentation there is for this stuff. In addition to the fanzine archive, there's also a Fancyclopedia website, which documents all this early fan activity. And it's a really stark difference between areas like this and some of the more obscure pockets of authors and groups, where we're just kind of guessing at their activities and feelings with the stuff. But yeah, the things that we're talking about tonight, there's a huge, huge amount of primary materials online. In fact, probably too much to reasonably list and discuss here in a single podcast episode. So we really recommend that you browse both these websites because it really is a fascinating timesink.

So fan club newsletters like The Comet and The Planet start to appear in early 1930, but in "Hints on Collecting Science Fiction", by Robert, an article in the Science Fiction Fan #4 from October of 1936, he attributes the Time Traveler as the first real fan magazine, which Jack Speer in his 1939 history of fandom, "Up to Now" agrees with. The Speer is considered by some to be the first history of science fiction fandom. Following a few years later would be the initial installments of Sam Moskowitz's ridiculously in depth history of this era called "The Immortal Storm: a History of Science Fiction Fandom." Moskowitz also agrees that the Time Traveler is the first real fanzine, so I guess we can consider that a universal consensus.

Despite the fact that just now I said that the fanzine archive has 21,483 issues on it, only one issue of the Time Traveler is posted. So while the website itself is an enormous archive, it's still just a piece of the puzzle. And many of those pieces appear to be still rare and undigitized. But the issue we do have is number two from February of 1932, and we see that the editors are Allen Glasser, Julius Schwartz, Mortimer Weisinger, and Forrest J. Ackerman, who would all basically go on to have lifelong careers in science fiction either as writers or industry people. Some of these people were involved with an earlier fan club newsletter called The Planet, and some of the same content from The Planet gets recycled into the Time Traveler.

So I'm obviously not going to go over every single zine that existed between 1930 and 1939, as there are dozens. But I briefly want to run down this issue of the Time Traveler.

So in issue number two of the Time Traveler, a mimeograph zine, you get a bit of that recycled content from The Planet, but it's pretty cool recycled content talking about how far technology has come since the days of Jules Verne and how those stories are now commonplace events. But what about the future of science fiction and how awesome is that going to be? We also get an update on new "scientifilms". So if you were ever looking for a worse word than "scientifiction", here is a suggested candidate for you.

JM:

I did start to get the feeling very early on that they were just sort of having fun with it and just like paying tribute to Hugo maybe a little bit. They didn't really take it that seriously, using these silly words like they do, they sounded silly, but it's kind of one of those things that fans do where they kind of adopt something even though they know it's goofy and stupid. It's because like it's fun and it reminds you of somebody. So that's kind of the feeling I got with all this scientific compound words that they were using in the magazine excerpts.

Nate:

Not everybody liked it, and certainly there is one article later that complains about it quite a bit. But also in this issue are some news from the science fiction magazine world, classified ads, a column that nitpicks the science errors in magazine stories, various trivia. There is a profile on Jack Williamson, some contests, but maybe the most interesting is a piece on the history of science fiction. And unfortunately this doesn't exist in full form in this issue as it carried over from issue number one, which again is unfortunately not online. But this issue picks up in the Middle Ages and goes through to the Enlightenment, not only mentioning Dante and Da Vinci as precursors, but also talks about Bergerac and Godwin, which answers the question that I had as if these works were known to the early science fiction community and it would appear that they indeed were.

One thing, however, this issue of the Time Traveler did not contain is original fiction, something that most of the fanzines in the 1930s would have in large proportions, in addition to the types of content that I listed above, though chiefly editorials and news bulletins. The Time Traveler itself was folded into the Science Fiction Digest, which became Fantasy Magazine. So even the lineage of individual fanzines itself is as complicated as the professional magazines they were mirroring.

And while we'll get into the fiction in a little bit, I think it's important to note that the fiction was being written by two kinds of people. The first being established authors like Clark Ashton Smith, who were likely shuffling off minor works that were rejected by publications like Weird Tales. And the second being teenagers who were publishing these zines themselves, fledgling authors looking to get started. So over the next few minutes, I want to talk about some of those people and who they were and their weird feuds and dramas in getting this whole thing off the ground.

The person whose name comes up by far the most in digging through all these zines is Donald Wollheim, who was born in 1914. So he would have been 20 at the time of the Great Staple War of 1934. Wollheim was into Burroughs, Haggard, Verne and Wells, and he discovered Amazing in 1927. Speer describes him as being contemptuous of younger fans as, "he is one of the older generation of fans who turned 21 years in the first fandom or before." So of course he knows what he's talking about more than these kids who got into science fiction a couple weeks ago.

JM:

So Wollheim seems really smart and really edgy.

Nate:

Yeah, he definitely is that kind of person.

JM:

Yeah, I like him, I think, for the most part.

Nate:

Yeah, he's definitely an interesting character, for sure.

Regarding the first fandom, Speer marks the end of this first era of fandom with the selling of Wonder Stories in 1936, which certainly felt like a huge event to those who were there at the time. Wollheim was a very frequent contributor to numerous fanzines, including serving on the editorial boards of numerous zines. There was a rather humorous dust-up between himself and Bob Tucker. Tucker established the Society for the Prevention of Wire Staples in Science Fiction magazines in 1934, shortly to be followed in opposition by Wollheim's International and Allied Organizations for the Purpose of Upholding and Maintaining the use of Metallic Fasteners in Science Fiction, which published the zine, the Polymorphaneucleated Leucocyte, possibly the best zine title of anything out of this episode, and they all gave themselves ridiculous titles like the Grand Booleywag or the High Cocolorum.

It's all a bunch of young people screwing around, but Wollheim's drama heats up a bit in 1935. As is a running theme through many of these episodes, Wollheim submitted a story to Wonder Stories, which was accepted and printed, but he never got paid for. He didn't take kindly to this, and he put up a really big stink, which caused a great deal of turmoil in the East New York Science Fiction League with Charles D. Hornig, who we previously mentioned was the teenage editor of Wonder Stories, and he was pitted against Wollheim, John B. Michel and Bill Sykora. Wollheim, Michel, and Sykora were expelled from the league, and they disrupted future meetings with their antics. Accounts, and reactions of all of this played out in the pages of the fan scenes at the time, including the British ones, so the drama even made its way across the Atlantic.

JM:

Yeah, and you can find so many extensive details of all this mentioned in a particular book. Sam Moskowitz's "Immortal Storm" fan history book. Yeah, the amount of detail gone into it is very exhaustive.

Nate:

It's kind of hard to read. I mean, it's good that works like this exist, that exhaustively document all of the various details and getting into the weeds of all this stuff, but it really does read like a reference work at the times, and certainly nothing like Sam Moskowitz's big discovery of Edward Page Mitchell. It's definitely not a gripping account at all.

JM:

Moskowitz seems to have done a lot of good work, like he's also one of the first people to write extensively and then uncover stuff about Hodgson, right?

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

And he did that "Science Fiction by Gaslight" anthology, which is really good. But the book is just generally drier than I was hoping it would be, like it's kind of, even the subtitle of the book kind of promises glorious humor it may have. But it's actually quite, you know, it's just sort of pedantic and very, I guess, you can't, I can't really fault Moskowitz for it. I mean, he's doing good work, but it's just, yeah, it's, it's not something I would really recommend unless you specifically want to use it as a reference book. Like I think there's probably more fun and amusing accounts of early fandom activities, probably written by other people.

Nate:

Yeah. And to be fair, he did start writing it when he was quite young. And he did indeed get involved in early fandom when he was quite young. I think he was 15 or so when he first started publishing his first fanzine. A lot of these people were really young when they started to get together and publish fanzines.

JM:

And we will have to keep that in mind going forward.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, Wollheim was one of the older ones.

Gretchen:

I have to say reading about this makes me feel like I haven't accomplished too much if these people are already creating fanzines at the age of 15.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a different world back then. I mean, fandom was just started to get going and took on a different character. And a lot of these people must have been from upper middle class backgrounds that they're able to afford or have access to mimeograph and hectograph equipment, which presumably wasn't prohibitively expensive, where only publishers and, I guess, large outfits could afford to have them, but certainly nothing that everybody could afford to do.

JM:

But it's also important to keep in mind that a lot of these kids, you could say, their ambitions certainly outlived their abilities.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

And a lot of these themes only lasted for a couple of issues that disappeared forever.

Gretchen:

Yeah, a couple of the ones that we are covering are the shorter lived ones, but there were, it seems, quite a few that were pretty successful.

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah, definitely something that lasted for a couple of decades. I'm sure they switched hands here and there. But yeah, it's kind of interesting how it plays out, especially people like Wollheim who would do a zine for one issue, then do another zine for an issue, and then just kind of keep bouncing around while still writing articles for other people's zines and things like that. Really interesting how the community is very close in it, and it wasn't in a case of people doing these things in a vacuum publishing to a local audience that were kind of unaware of other things going around. It was very much a very tight-knit community. Everybody seemed to be acutely aware of everybody else. And even though a lot of the activity does seem to be centered around the New York, New Jersey area, we do get zines that pop up pretty much all over the United States as well as the UK. I didn't see anything from Canada, I don't think, in the zines that I took a look at, but it wouldn't surprise me if some stuff popped up there as well.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, I've never really looked too into specifically Canadian fan activities from back then. I guess that's something that did cross my mind a little bit.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Certainly, a probably most famous claim to fame from that time in terms of the science fiction community is that Alfred Van Vogt is from Manitoba somewhere. Right, right. I think by the, I guess maybe, well, maybe it wasn't till the 50s, but he moved to Los Angeles, ended up helping Hubbard run his operations for a little while before he kind of fell out of favor with the whole thing and decided it wasn't cool after all. But yeah, I mean, and there's probably a couple of other things that I'm not remembering now, but yeah, definitely there seems to be more of a, I mean, it's not much of one, but even more of a scene now than there was back then, like now there might be, I don't know, Canadian science fiction is known as being dystopian, I guess. I don't know how much of that is because of the influence of like Atwood, for example, who tends to write that way when she does write in that mold.

Nate:

But yeah, I mean, yeah, I couldn't find anything else aside from US and UK stuff on the fanzine archive. I'm not sure if zines popped up in other countries or languages that aren't English. There doesn't seem to be anything written suggesting that that was the case, but you never know, something may surface at some point.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, I would maybe expect like possibly France would be like, but even then, I mean, it seems like, but it seems like they had, like in a couple of the resources we have on the European history of science fiction, I would say the vast majority of it is French works. And yeah, again, like there's probably one central figure sort of responsible for setting that off, that being Verne, right? But like after that, there's so many writers that wanted, a couple of things that mentioned so many works and authors that I never heard of it, don't know anything about. And a lot of them are translated by Brian Stapleford.

Nate:

Yes, he's done a huge amount of work. And it's been the last 10 years, especially. The amount of stuff he's translated is just ridiculous.

JM:

Yeah, but I don't know about actual magazines or fan stuff. And I think the British, we'll get to that when you're ready, Nate, but the British guys talk about that a bit, they talk about why there are no magazines like no professional magazines, as opposed to fan magazines in Britain at this time. And so the main goal of the British fans is to make it so that there is one.

Nate:

Yeah, and it's interesting that pretty much all the British conversations in their fanzines are focused around the same American science fiction pulp magazines.

JM:

Yeah, and they're so much more polite than their American counterparts. They're so fitting the stereotype.

Gretchen:

Not as much drama going on.

Nate:

Yeah, they have to report on the American drama.

JM:

We might fight, but we're not going to talk about it.

Gretchen:

Yeah, they report on the American drama, like how YouTube channels will report on drama they're not involved with now.

Nate:

Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting stuff.

JM:

Definitely. 

Nate:

And it seems like the British would follow the American model in terms of both the fanzines, the pulp magazines themselves, as well as the conventions. So, Wollheim, Michel and Sykora, the three expelled members would be instrumental in establishing what is almost universally considered to be the first science fiction convention. That is the first Eastern Science Fiction Convention that was held in Philadelphia on October 2 of 1936. And there's a great picture of it on Fancyclopedia, which will link in the episode description, but I just want to read the caption of the photograph. So it says, "Oswald Train, Donald A. Wollheim, Milton A. Rothman, Frederik Pohl, John B. Michel, William S. Sykora (holding the NYB-ISA flag), David A. Kyle, and Robert Madle. They're standing in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Not pictured: Herbert E. Goudket, who took the photograph, and John V. Baltadonis, who had not arrived at the time the picture was taken".

So the first science fiction convention was like a dozen people, just a bunch of kids hanging out in Philadelphia, is kind of a massive difference in scope and scale than something like Worldcon today. Frederik Pohl would have been 16 at the time of this photograph and would later go on to be an incredibly well acclaimed science fiction author and editor. But this time he was not only involved in the science fiction fanzine circuit, but radical politics. While Wollheim was seen as kind of the leader of this crew. It seems like Pohl got them all into communism pole himself running a radical politics zine called the Flatbush Artery, which published its first issue on January of 1938.

Wollheim was Jewish and had a personal hatred towards the Nazis and fascism, and this adoption of communism certainly put them at odds with some of the others in the science fiction community.

JM:

Especially John Campbell.

Nate:

Yes, especially John Campbell. But Wollheim was instrumental in the establishment of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association and served as interim president at the time of the adoption of the groups constitution in May of 1937.

Wollheim and his crew would put on conventions for the rest of the 1930s, and the fandom expanded to the point where conventions separate from him sprung up. One of the people that is another important figure in this whole saga is Sam Moskowitz, who published the first issue of his zine Helios in June of 1937. Before this episode, Moskowitz is one of the most invoked names on the podcast as he was later a prominent science fiction critic and author, perhaps from our standpoint the most significant of which is the rediscovery of Edward Page Mitchell who we have of course covered on the podcast numerous times and we really enjoy his stuff.

But he was also not above getting in his own little feuds, and he was in particular at odds with Wollheim and he set up his own conventions in Newark. From what I can tell these few stem from petty disputes over convention reporting, and personally I think it would be agonizing and totally off putting dealing with this kind of stuff and these personalities but I guess that's the nature of fandom.

But by 1939, conventions were being held in the UK as well, and by this time Speer notes "the rising popularity of fan fiction—fiction in which the principal characters are fans—either synthetic, type characters, or actual personages. Cosmic Tales, under Kuslan, was foremost in this; and 'Mickey' also calls to mind another exception to the main current". 

In addition to the publications already mentioned, Moskowitz cites the Fantasy Fan the Fantasy Magazine and Fantasy News as being the most important publications. So that kind of briefly brings us up to 1939. And if you want some more information, definitely check out these spear and Moskowitz books. As we've mentioned the Moskowitz is incredibly incredibly detailed and contains tons of photographs it's maybe not the most captivating and thrilling read, but it is extremely detailed and contains a lot, a lot of information.

JM:

More than I wanted to know, but I'm really glad somebody was documenting this stuff thoroughly and I do think like it is an interesting contrast to like some of the music stuff, right where it does seem like their approach is a little bit less... You know, like there's, there's a real effort among the science fiction fan community to be organized and be like kind of a coherent movement almost and it feels like idealism, you know, it feels like something that punks definitely don't have.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

Interesting. It's really interesting to see all that I think.

Nate:

It definitely is. Yeah. I guess also somewhat unique in that it differs from other areas of science fiction we've looked at like the Latin American stuff or the Soviet stuff where there is this huge amount of primary documentation there. So all the questions that kind of pop up when we're doing the research, well they're answered in excruciating detail by some of these reference works so yeah it's good that the stuff is there and it's again all online if you want to dig into it.

July 1939 is, like we've mentioned, not only the issue of Astounding we'll be focusing on next month but also when the first Worldcon was held of which Moskowitz was instrumental in establishing and of course is still being held today and I guess we could consider it's the main convention for science fiction literature,  that the Hugo Awards are presented there and so the Hugo Awards of 2023 is the 81st World Science Fiction Convention. So yeah, quite a long running and successful convention, of course, but this first one was also rife with drama with Wollheim and Moskowitz. Moskowitz denied entry to him, Frederik Pohl, Michel, and Robert A. W. Lowndes, Cyril Kornbluth, Jack Gillespie. So a lot of feuds with a lot of people probably over for really petty teenager reasons.

JM:

Yeah, and they're all mostly all, yeah men from a certain area of a certain age. Yeah, I think Moskowitz does mention one black fan early on. Yeah, it's kind of he doesn't really go into it very much apparently he was a rocket enthusiast and people were meeting at his house and stuff like that.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah, it definitely seems like most of the people that were into this were definitely not a diverse bunch of mostly young white, almost no women. And I think that was the only non-white person that has mentioned in the early fandom history.

JM:

You gotta wonder too, with with some of the kind of personalities that were involved, like if women had kind of really been interested in hanging out with them maybe some other women like yeah that's okay. I can be a science fiction fan without being into that.

Nate:

It does feel very much like a boys club though. And the segueway into one kind of final addendum and coda to this whole story is that, while I'm, I guess is most known now for his bootlegging of "Lord of the Rings" decades after the events of this take place. He also is featured in a recent documentary entitled "Casa Susanna" that features one aspect of his later life from the 1960s, which was previously unknown to this documentary coming out a couple years ago, in that his daughter found out after his death that he spent several years at what was referred to as the time as "a cross dressing club" in the Catskills, and wrote the book "A Year Among the Girls" under the pseudonym Darrell Raynor. The book appears divisive in the transgender community, but Wollheim being the author was not known until very recently. The language used in, I guess, Wollheim's book and the documentary is probably different than the language would be used today. Wollheim didn't refer to himself using female pronouns. Would he do so differently if he was a teenager in the 2020s versus the 1920s? That's really impossible to say. But it is a very, I guess, interesting look at his life in that this was pretty much a secret known to nobody in the community until a couple years ago. So it's kind of a weird and interesting tangent there.

JM:

He seems to be somebody who likes to provoke people and I kind of wonder if, I mean, it'd be interested to read the book, I guess that would answer the question.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

It just seems like sometimes he just wants to make people feel intimidated almost by his actions and the crazy things that he says and stuff. Does it kind of get that feeling of that kind of personality?

Nate:

Yeah, and I think one of the criticisms of the book that is a bit sensationalized. Yeah, it would be interesting to read for sure. I mean, connections to the science fiction community aside. So I guess getting back to the community and the fandom, this story again has been primarily American and British. Moskowitz does mention Japanese, Spanish, Russian and Dutch language magazines, that is, professionally produced magazines. So he was at least vaguely aware of the existence of contemporary international science fiction magazines, although as we've seen translations of these stories have been sparse. And I know at least for some of the Mexican magazines, a lot of them printed Spanish language translations of the American pulp stuff. So we're going to take a look for what Spanish language pulp era stuff there is out there. I'm not sure how much will turn up, but again, like with the Russian stuff, who knows.

So for the background of this episode, we took a look at a number of fanzines from the 1930s, and I pulled a number of excerpts from a wide variety. I mainly pulled stuff that were interesting editorials, either they documented a convention or they were inflammatory, or a review or had something of interest to them for the podcast. So I think over the next couple of minutes, we're just going to talk about some of those pieces. I had a couple that I wanted to read out. I guess we could all kind of comment as we go along. 

So a couple of things that stuck out to me was one mention in a UK zine, the Futurian, volume #2 from June number 1938, and that they do a profile on the writings of George Griffith, and the author says, "one has to assume that they were not really good books because while the contemporary works of H.G. Wells are still famous, Griffith appears to be unknown even to the science fiction fraternity." 

So I thought that was just kind of interesting how like the major writer of scientific romance before H.G. Wells came along was a total obscurity even within the UK by the...

JM:

By 1938. Yeah. And that does kind of fit in with something that I was kind of thinking of mentioning earlier was that it is interesting too, see to how I guess in some ways you can be vindicated and otherwise not when you think about how, well, let's take like the time period, for example, and the Weird Tales writers like H.P. Lovecraft. 

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Everybody knows who he is. Clark Ashton Smith, I feel like maybe, I don't know, maybe it's just I've looked into it more, but I feel like maybe he's more popular now than he was like in what I first discovered him in the early 2000s. Like I think there have been the reprints of his collected fiction, and some probably some poetry reprints and stuff like that and it's like it seems like maybe he's getting some of the attention he deserves. But back then he was really popular too. And I'm kind of almost surprised to see like how often his name comes up and that he actually seems to be have been very well liked. On the other hand, Seabury Quinn, who was very well liked, is almost forgotten now. And he wrote like 90 plus occult detective stories about this occult detective in New Jersey with the hilarious French stereotype personality, Jules de Grandin. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, I remember when we were when looking through some of the Weird Tales stuff and not at the time not knowing his name and seeing all the stuff that he had written for them.

JM:

Yeah, they love him. Yeah. Yeah.

Nate:

And Clark Ashton Smith definitely seems to be like the celebrity along with Lovecraft and the fanzines that lean more towards the Weird Tales angle.

Gretchen:

Yeah, yeah, because there was the in Moskowitz reading about the time when I think it was forest Ackerman like criticized one of his stories and everyone sort of attacked him and like came to Smith's defense.

Nate:

Forrest Ackerman does not seem to be well liked based on some of these zine articles and profiles. 

JM:

But he was a pretty accomplished literary agent and he did create some things and I think he was even involved with some movies. He also created the character of Vampirella. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

Yeah, I don't know much about her but she's a sexy comic vampire chick I guess. Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I get I get a comic catalog every month and I've come across her before. 

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah. But another interesting thing that was from that same issue of the UK zine is a teaser from John Campbell of what's coming up in Astounding. And he announces both "Who Goes There?" and the debut of L. Ron Hubbard so two major science fiction events teased in one little article I thought that was kind of 

JM:

An exclusive write up for a British magazine. That's pretty cool. 

Nate:

Yeah. Let's see what else do we have here. There is a lot of science fiction history and bibliography in these scenes which I thought was another interesting piece of the puzzle that you know we were kind of speculating about since we started the podcast of exactly how much of this pre-Shelley imaginary traveler type stuff was known to the early science fiction fandom and it turns out quite a lot. Donald Wollheim wrote an article in the Phantagraph where he talks about a number of texts from the 1500s and 1600s. In addition to More's "Utopia" he mentioned the Godwin that we covered. There's "Christianapolis" by Johann Andrae. We covered "New Atlantis". He mentioned" City the Sun" by Tomason Campanella, "Incaria" by Joannes Biselius and a number of these other obscure 1600s titles, a rather amusing sounding one is "The Floating Island" by the unfortunately named Richard head written in 1673.

JM:

So do you guys actually think he read most of these. 

Nate:

You know I'm not sure. 

JM:

I mean yeah we don't know that's that's the thing like but I just kind of wonder you know is he just trying to show off his knowledge in the fanzine by putting all this stuff in.

Nate:

It's certainly possible, but it's also possible he had access to a large library like you'd find in New York and might have been actually able to read these things.

JM:

He does like seem like somebody who would have read quite voraciously so I mean I can sort of imagine that maybe he has read some of these works. 

Nate:

Yeah. They certainly all seem to be English language in contrast with the numerous works that were mentioned in both the Hollow Earth book and what was that one science fiction history book is that Roberts, Adam Roberts, Robert Adams something like that.

JM:

Adam Roberts "The History of Science Fiction". 

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah that's it. Where he talks about tons of French works from the 1600s and none of those seem to be mentioned here so.

JM:

No, and I'm kind of thinking I wonder if some of that stuff was difficult to obtain in in translation.

Gretchen:

I mean when we were talking earlier even how some Italian authors are difficult to obtain nowadays, I'm sure the back then it was very difficult to find that.

JM:

But like I think Aldiss was one of the first people I mean I don't know who made me maybe it came up a fair amount before but like I certainly don't recall coming up with "Niels Klim" too much like that coming up in too much of the the history.

Nate:

Yeah, they're, again it's unfortunate that a lot of these fanzines exist only in fragmentary form online and not complete runs, because there was a bibliography that one of the early fanzines published and we get like B through G or something like that, of what survives and it's kind of interesting to note what works they do mention like they mentioned a whole bunch of Marie Corelli works as well as "R.U.R." and it would have been neat to have the entire thing to see exactly what was known definitively by these prominent editors of these fanzines at the time as far as like what works are out there.

JM:

And I think it's interesting to that first excerpt you read out at the beginning of the history segment was basically talking about forming a science fiction library.

Nate:

Right, yeah, exactly. 

JM:

Basically trying to start a repository of all these books so people interested in the history of science fiction could start looking into it.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

There's no Wikipedia around right so.

Nate:

It would be a ways off it does have some interesting parallels with how knowledge is curated and assembled and organized so it's pretty cool that fans were taking this up that early on. And that is reflected in a lot of these fanzines as they did publish a fair amount of bibliography and history. There's three or four that kind of go over the same stuff which is interesting to see.

JM:

So can we start getting into their opinions?

Nate:

Yes. A lot of these are very opinionated people especially the magazine The Rebel which was published out of Alabama. And there's this one article here, "What's wrong with the readers" and the author says some pretty inflammatory things but very opinionated things so he says,

"FAN magazines are full of articles purporting to explain what’s wrong with fantasy fiction, some of them serious analytical discussions, but most of them simply sorehead yells by guys who wouldn’t know a good story if they saw one. I'm sick of it. The writers and editors take it on the chin. The editors are damn fools; they're hidebound follows of a formula; they won’t take good stuff. So the soreheads assert. Or the writers are slaves of the formula; they won’t write good stuff because they know it won’t be accepted. “Ah, for the days of the old Argosy, and stories like ‘The Blind Spot’,‘Under the Moons of Mars’, and such classics!” Yeah. I’d like to see those days come back, too. But there's some' body to blame besides authors and editors. THE READERS."

JM:

Yeah, you can picture that read like probably some like thick Alabama accent.

Nate:

Yeah. But yeah, he can use it go off on, he specifically uses the phrase "Tom Sawyer on Jupiter piffle" as a way of dismissing all the other stuff that these I guess stupid kids are liking.

JM:

Oh yeah, not a fan of late period Mark Twain.

Nate:

Yeah, right.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

He concludes by saying "I wish the rest would stick to flash Gordon and the Bobbsy twins and give fantasy a chance to go someplace!"

So he's I guess one some really high quality thought provoking stuff like Argosy used to publish.

JM:

Yeah. Well, they did publish "Claimed".

Nate:

Yeah. They published a lot of things.

JM:

A lot of cool things. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, I mean, you know, like that stuff was fun and it didn't it seemed harmless enough. The stuff that was talking about exterminating drug fiends and stuff like that. That was a little...

Nate:

Yeah. There's one piece that just like it comes out of nowhere and I'm going to read it out of its entirety because it's so like.

JM:

Well, it's just his opinion piece from this, crap, what was his name?

Nate:

The guy is Herman D. Kaidor, which I didn't recognize the name.

JM:

Yeah, nobody remembers who he is. Yeah, I can think of a lot of heroin addicts who are more famous than him.

Nate:

Yeah. But it appeared in issue #3 of The Planet. And again, just comes out of nowhere, he's just, I don't know where this is coming from, but he says:

"In the informal discussion on methods of dealing with the criminal and abolishing crime, which was held at our clubrooms recently, I advocated for the isolation of confirmed criminals (i.e. imbeciles and morons) in order that they may not be allowed to propagate. In Wisconsin and several other states, this idea is partly carried out with some success. In these states, such criminals are sterilized.

"If all civilized nations would adopt this method of dealing with mental defectives, from which class most criminals come, I believe that crime would gradually diminish until it is entirely wiped out, and the world will be come a much better place in which to live."

JM:

Aren't you a smart boy?

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Getting flashbacks to our last episode when we were discussing eugenics.

Nate:

I know, yeah, yeah, let's just force sterilize all the criminals, the imbeciles and the morons.

JM:

Oh, God. I mean, he could never predict that in 2023 we're looking at his garbage and being like...

Gretchen:

This very crazy opinion from just a science fiction magazine.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah. I actually thought it was a good enough thing to print because he, I guess, hashed it out in the club rooms and, you know, who knows what other things were said behind the doors in those club rooms in 1930. Yeah. Yeah.

Gretchen:

To be a fly on the wall.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Well, I mean, I'm sure there were people out there who are more than willing to go along with that kind of ideology. So, I mean, it's come up a little bit before and it probably will again.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely some ugly attitudes in both the fans and the writers, as I'm sure we'll see.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

Maybe not so much in this episode.

JM:

So on a similarly biologically motivated note, I was really happy with the letter from David H. Keller, MD. He had some cool thoughts on the state of science fiction. He is a writer that we haven't covered on the podcast, but there have been a few of his stories, whose titles I wrote down and I thought, yeah, maybe it would be cool to talk about them someday. I mean, like, we were doing the Amazing episode and he wrote a lot of stories for Amazing. And, you know, there were so many writers that you can't really do everybody in the order that they might appear in terms of the episodes that we're doing yet. There's no reason we can't come back to them later.

So David Keller is certainly somebody who I thought, yeah, that might be cool. He gets a funny mention in that "Pioneers of Wonder". He has a funny anecdote about David Keller. He says, David Keller was a really good writer, but his manuscripts and I don't know, this kind of made me laugh because he didn't say this, but it kind of made me think because he was an MD. Apparently he was like, I think he was a pediatrician or something like that, which makes sense. But he's an MD and his manuscripts were terrible. His manuscripts were almost unreadable and the editors really had to struggle to make sense of anything that he put down. And I don't know. I just thought that was funny. Eric Leif Davin, that's his name.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah.

JM:

He wrote down some funny anecdotes like he asked questions of Hornig and Hornig had lots of funny anecdotes about the people that he encountered in the community and that I read last month. What he had to say about John Campbell, which was not very flattering, but he also had comments about Henry Kuttner, Amelia Reynolds Long, who will come up in our Astounding episode, actually, and many others. And it's just really fun to read that as a historical document as well.

But Keller has some thoughts about the state of science fiction and he also congratulates himself for including the most talk about babies and most babies in comparison to any other science fiction writer. David Keller and being very, very proud of his baby representation. And I got to get to get behind that to a certain extent. I mean, it just, it was pretty random, but it was awesome. I write about babies, y'all. What? Cool. And you know, I mean, I've read, I wouldn't say necessarily Keller's the most exciting writer, but he is pretty cool. I mean, I've read some of his stories and he's got, he definitely was thinking on a more, I guess, social level than some of his peers in Amazing and not just gadgets and random Atlantis.

Nate:

Right. Right.

JM:

I don't know. It's, it's cool. He's written a few kind of more psychologically oriented horror stories as well. And I feel like maybe he was one of the first writers because like early on, you know, science fiction was very proud of having technical and scientific writers. And maybe he was one of the first writers to make use of his profession in a way that was like integrated into the stories being a medical person. Right. Like, E. E. Doc Smith always put Doc in front of his name, but I don't think his stories were really like that. It was more like, you know, the super science and space, amazing spaceships and stuff like that. And so, yeah, I don't know. I enjoyed Keller's letter and his hail to baby representation.

Nate:

Yeah, a couple of the other things that I thought were cool in these are the writeups of the conventions that they put on. So one that Sam Moskowitz wrote about, he details all the teenagers that came to the 1937 convention that was...

Gretchen:

Yeah, which is the one that he, he organized, right?

Nate:

The ISA.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Oh.

Nate:

So a couple of the excerpts from this writeup are George R. Hahn of Fantasia fame who is 14 entertained himself by shooting spitballs at Jim Blish and William H. Miller amidst the gurgling of science fiction specials. Ice cream sodas to you. And then he goes on to say Jim Blish lived in continuous worry. The economical chap had spent 95 cents, five cents more than his estimate. He came all the way from East Orange, New Jersey to Long Island, New York. Our guess is ice cream sodas. What say?

JM:

Oh, man.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Really capturing the teenage boy energy.

Nate:

Yeah. Definitely a lot of teenagers doing teenage things for sure.

JM:

So I mean, we'll be talking about Jim Blish a little more in a bit.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

But it's kind of really interesting to see, I guess, where he went based on what we have here to look at.

Nate:

Yeah. And so many names pop up here that would become writers later on in the 1950s and 1960s as a mature into adults. But here, a lot of these people are as teenagers. And it's just kind of fascinating at how many names you really do find in these issues of people writing in letters or giving their opinions or attending the conventions in some way.

JM:

Yeah. And some of them will be involved for decades to come.

Nate:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. A lifelong careers for some of these people, definitely. And there's also a really funny write up of a pilgrimage that Richard Wilson and a couple of his friends made to Sam Moskowitz's house.

JM:

Oh, yeah.

 Nate:

Five o'clock in the morning and they ring the doorbell and he's all confused and blurry. I'd wanted to know why they were there. And they tell him that Bill Sykora died and he was just like, oh, okay.

JM:

Yeah, that kind of was familiar to where my to me of going to shows in other cities and like just like sleeping at kind of random people's houses because the band was there and stuff.

Nate:

Sam's all worried about what's he going to tell his parents about these science fiction fans sitting in his kitchen until seven in the morning, you know, eating his matzos and drinking his tea. And it's just kind of adorably charming. So I guess the last thing that I had that I wanted to read is a poem.

JM:

Oh, yeah.

Nate:

These are the favorites of the author and the poem is entitled "Favorites." So get ready for some bad poetry here.

"Burroughs, Cummings, Merritt, Kline Burks and Leinster; none so fine. Ed Hamilton and Vic Rousseau With Captain Meek complete the show. In the field of science fiction They're supreme, that's my conviction"

JM:

Yeah. Captain Meek gets mentioned.

Gretchen:

I was going to say there's our Captain Meek.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah.

 JM:

Well, well, he's in Asimov's "Before the Golden Age" anthology where he has all these short stories that he's particularly really remembered from mostly the late 20s to 1938 or thereabouts. And there's "Old Faithful" is in there. And a lot of other ones from that time period, including some authors that will be coming up very soon.

 Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

But yeah, you know, that does... That's pretty cute.

Nate:

Yeah. Not the greatest poem in the world, but that kind of stuff is just a lot of fun to read. And there's a lot of those little fun excerpts all all over these zines.

JM:

Don't forget Wollheim's "Exasperating Tales".

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah, I don't even know where to start with with that one. It's over the top and it makes lots of promises about sex and all that. And you just get a bunch of nonsense. It seems like Wollheim was big into publishing very, very silly things.

JM:

Sorry. "Flabbergasting tales."

Nate:

Yeah, right.

JM:

That's what it was.

Nate:

Yeah.

 JM:

Yeah. Maybe Wollheim himself is a bit exasperating, but yeah.

Nate:

Yeah. Definitely dig into these zines on the fan archive page. And again, we'll post a link to this in the episode description. There's just so much really cool and fascinating stuff to dig into.

(music: echoey pingy synth)

Sam Moskowitz - "Why Doesn't Our Ship Move" (1937)

Nate:

So I guess with that, why don't we start to transition into the fiction that was published in these fanzines as we are a literature podcast, first and foremost, though the literature this time around.

JM:

What did you say? Literature? Yes, literature. That's what we're talking about today.

 Nate:

Yeah. It's not the main character of this episode, but we are going to list this as a regular bonus episode as we are talking about a couple of stories that appear in some of these fanzines.

JM:

Yeah. The Doctor Who magazine that I was talking about, that DWIN published, it was a not, I mean, it was mostly a fan magazine, obviously, but it featured news and features of various kind. There was a regular short fiction section and usually featured one story, every issue. I will say that there were definitely fanzines that were more dedicated to short fiction.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

In Doctor Who, particularly, there were a few different magazines. Most of the names I can't remember, but there was actually a local guy. It wasn't that local, but living in town about an hour away from me and he put out these really good quality professional looking fiction zines, Doctor Who fiction zines. It was like one a year for maybe five years or something like that. They were actually really good, really well done. There are certain efforts in that sphere that work out, but I think most of these fan magazines that actually just feature the odd fiction piece, you probably won't remember most of these stories.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

It's not generally, I don't know, we'll talk about it as we go through these, but most of these are amateur or cast off kind of work.

Nate:

They definitely are. In some ways, it kind of lends itself to the format. So, fanzines are physically much smaller than your professionally printed magazine.

JM:

Right.

Nate:

And they have a much smaller page count. So, these stories themselves tend to be much shorter overall.

JM:

But that doesn't mean the quality has to be less.

Nate:

No, that's true. I mean, a story that would be like five or six thousand words would take up the entire issue. So, a lot of these stories that are printed in here are like two thousand words or less. And there are a couple that are either stories that were rejected or were just like an unfinished sketch or something like that, or were written by teenagers who have no prior writing experience and really have no idea.

JM:

And often they're the zine editors.

Nate:

Right. Exactly. Yeah.

JM:

They get to print their stuff.

Nate:

So, let's talk about the teenagers first, because in a way, I think they're a little bit more interesting than the professionally published authors, even though those are probably better stories than the teenager works. The teenager works just have a certain charm to it. And while I wouldn't want to read like a whole book of this stuff, it's kind of interesting picking a couple here and there. Sam Moskowitz in the first issue of his zine Helios published, at first I wasn't really sure if it was even a story, I guess it kind of is, but it's "Why Our Ship Doesn't Move", and he subtitles it, "A science fiction story of human appeal and original thought."

JM:

So, the title is the title is definitely the coolest thing about the story.

Nate:

It's 300 words. Basically, it's only three paragraphs. It's easily the shortest thing that we're taking a look at tonight. It's even shorter than some stuff we've read on air in its entirety. So, it's incredibly short.

And just to give a brief summary, a guy named Davidson is dying. His ship's just been ransacked by space pirates and they're off with his goods. But six weeks later, they'll be dead because somehow he turned their rocket propulsion tanks into vacuum so they're not going anywhere. They're just like adrift in orbit. And this is, of course, an excuse to briefly have a sentence or two discussion about rocket physics and, you know, look at how knowledgeable I am about science. Isn't that cool? So, that's basically this story.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it didn't make any sense. It didn't go anywhere. It didn't like, I mean, but almost feels superfluous to even comment on that.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

It is what it is. He had the opportunity to put it there. So, he did. Moskowitz, I guess he did maybe write a little bit of fiction later, but he's definitely more known as a science fiction historian and critic than an actual prose writer.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I was interested in seeing what his fiction would be like, because we have all read what his work is like for podcast backgrounds. We read the Edward Page Mitchell section that he wrote. And also, I had to read, well, didn't have to. You know, I read for the Olaf Stapledon background, what he wrote about him. So, I was kind of interested to see what his prose would be like. And, you know, it's, I definitely prefer his nonfiction works.

JM:

Right.

Nate:

I mean, there's a bit of a caveat with it. You know, he's really young here, but...

Gretchen:

He's young and he does talk about in his "Immortal storm", his unofficial Society for the Aid of Fan Magazines in Need of Material or the Moskowitz Manuscript Bureau, which he advertises in Helios, which is where the story was. And basically, he didn't have enough many times, so he would just bang out like very short stories himself. So, it kind of feels like this might be something that he just really had to include because there wasn't enough material.

Nate:

Yeah. Page filler, basically.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

And that's, it seems like the case with a lot of these self-run zines where the author is also the editor. A lot of them tried their hand at amateur comics as well, because the comic scene, I guess, was becoming a popular thing at this time. And the comics on some of them are definitely rougher than the prose stylings. A couple editors complained that they don't want their zines to become a parade for amateur cartoonists or something.

JM:

I noticed that, and I was going to say there seemed to be some complaints about the amount of comics that were showing up. I guess it wasn't necessarily a reflection on the feeling about the format of comics, but just that maybe the people drawing the comics were not very good at it, so they shouldn't draw comics.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Kind of thing.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

And some of the comics represented the drama that was going on between fans because there was one that was when Bloomer and Blish were fighting because Blish apparently had ripped him off after he wasn't able to pay him back for printing. There was like, he just, I think he depicted him like doing the Nazi salute or something very petty comic regarding that feud.

Nate:

Yeah, it's definitely a good medium to be petty jerk and caricaturize somebody in visual form, when you're a teenager and you want to import these petty feuds to a nationwide audience.

JM:

Well, yeah, yeah. And you think you can do anything.

Nate:

Yeah, right, yeah.

JM:

There's a comment I have about one of our later writers that reflects on that, but I think I'll save it for then because I have a way of blowing my fun quips a bit too early, so I'm trying not to do that, but yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, I don't know. Not much to say about Sam Moskowitz, but he was a teenager and he did his own scene and that's pretty neat.

JM:

But the title of the story and the subtitle already shows his propensity for being a critic.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

JM:

It's like an Oscar Wilde title, like it's kind of one of these like, here I have something important and profound to say about the art that we're making here. Here's a story that will appeal to original thoughts.

Nate:

I think Wilde was a bit more talented though.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

And I think he's being like hyperbolic.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely.

Gretchen:

It does sound like a subtitle that he would use later for a nonfiction piece on another science fiction author.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah, it's like he's anticipating all these science fiction critics who would come up like in the 50s, especially in the 60s, who would be like, why can't we take science fiction in new directions and like, why does everything have to be like a Western?

Nate:

Certainly some of the academic criticism too.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

In more recent times.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I think that one of the key skills that an academic has to have is having good subtitles.

Nate:

Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah.

(music: spacey delayed synth)

James Blish - "Pursuit into Nowhere: Adopted from the Annals of Space Patrol" (1936)

Nate:

But I guess another teenager writing his own zine and writing his own fiction was Jim Blish, who would become known as a science fiction author in his later life.

JM:

Big time.

Nate:

Yeah. Multiple award winner, very well acclaimed. And this one is "Pursuit into Nowhere." I guess he did a series of this stuff "Adapted from the Annals of Space Patrol" in his zine "The Planeteer".

JM:

Yeah. So the Planeteer is some kind of space pirate basically.

Nate:

Yeah. Yeah, right. It reminded me a lot of "The Prince of Space" by Jack Williamson, just written by a teenager whose skills are very unfocused.

JM:

Right. So this is the guy that I was thinking of.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

I will say now that I think the difference between a writer and everybody else is that eventually everybody else learns to stop sharing their fantasies with the world. And a writer just learns to get better at it to the point where he's like, yeah. Now he can do this and Jim Blish is that guy. This story is really bad. But I mean, by the 1940s, he would be doing really cool stuff. His heyday was really in the 1950s. He wrote really cool stories like "The Sunken Universe" and "Surface Tension", which are about like humans, many tries to microscopic size and in a new world that they have to live like that basically. So a lot of the things he wrote about were like cool, biological changes in humanity that's necessary to adapt to space travel or colonization and stuff like that. But he also did a lot of other stuff. We're going to talk a little bit about Star Trek later. He actually, James Blish, novelized all of the original series of Star Trek.

Gretchen:

As we're speaking, I have his novelizations like on the shelf next to me with all my other Star Trek books.

JM:

Yeah, I've read a couple myself. And basically what they are is it's not like the Doctor Who novelizations. There are several in one book, so they're like short stories. I can't remember how many of them there are, but there's like maybe three or so every Trek season. So each one contains like maybe six or seven Star Trek stories. And they're novelized by a person who had access to the scripts, but never actually saw the show, at least not in the early ones. Some people say that the early ones are really interesting, like because they kind of portray the characters as he saw them in his head from reading the scripts, not necessarily from seeing Shadar and Nimoy, right? So that's kind of cool.

Blish also wrote the story "There Shall Be No Darkness", which was made into the film "The Beast Must Die" by our old favorites, Amicus.

Blish was born in 1921, and he only lived till 1975. I think he was born in the New Jersey area somewhere, and he moved to England in 1969 and died five years later. So he definitely grew as a writer big time. One of the books that I had written down for a future possibility for Chrononauts was the 1960 something Hugo winner, "A Case of Conscience", which was the first book in what became a series kind of. I think the connections are pretty loose, but the series is known as "Black Easter" and it's kind of this, it starts out as science fiction with a kind of a religious overtone to it and develops into this crazy apocalyptic scenario with demons and demigods and all this magic and crazy shit. It's pretty awesome.

"A Case of Conscience" is more like weird first contact science fiction and this Jesuit priest has to decide if he thinks that this planet is inhabited by devils or not. It's really interesting. And I definitely want to cover it on the podcast.

So it's really fascinating to come to this like really early example of Blish's writing. Like he's not a writer I'm hugely knowledgeable about, but I've read enough of his stuff where I would say, yeah, like I kind of know his style. I know his things. The Star Trek stuff is not really typical of him, but at the same time it is like I can see why he did it. And he didn't just write novelizations either. He wrote the first official Star Trek tie-in book, "Spock Must Die."

So this is again like the "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" written by Don D'Ammassa actually places him on a level with pretty pleady close to like Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke in terms of popularity among science fiction authors. And certainly those Star Trek novelizations are probably on more shelves than many other science fiction books.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

So I don't know. Blish was also a critic and wrote a lot of essays about not just science fiction, but other. I mean, he had a lot of other interests as well. He was very passionate about music and classical music in particular. So yeah, interesting guy, long history of writing.

This is just some story about a space pirate and his weird vengeance on. I don't know. There's there's a character called the Avenger, but he's like the villain.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

I kind of thought like maybe he should be the good guy.

Nate:

Yeah, the whole thing is pretty confused.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I feel like I thought maybe he was trying to subvert things, but maybe he could have just been been confused about it.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

So this was published in 1936, probably right around the time he turned 15. So I don't know if he wrote it when he was like 14 but really, really young.

JM:

It reads very much like that.

Nate:

Yeah, it really does.

Gretchen:

I do have to ask, how would the two of you pronounce the navigator's name?

Nate:

I have no idea.

JM:

I have no idea. You know what? I don't think Blish, I don't think Blish wanted us to. That's why he got rid of him like, like within the first scene, right? It's like introduce this character whose name you can't pronounce and then thank God we killed him off.

Nate:

Right. I think that was, I mean, talk about ridiculous science fiction names. This one might be up there as far as the silliest one we've come so far.

JM:

Navigator Klkaxlkadjfsldfjaldjf.

Nate:

So it is spelled T-U-V-Q-X-Z-J-K.

JM:

That was close.

Gretchen:

Тувкхжйк. Yeah. Just a key smash.

Nate:

Yeah, he's from Ganymede, so if you want to picture what the Ganymede language is like, we would certainly be interested in hearing your comments on the matter.

JM:

Yeah. I think it's interesting to see how early on, I mean, I shouldn't be surprised by this, but how early on in the fandom, people were like making spoofs and parodies and all kinds of like, yeah, it's not some new thing that came about in the 90s. Like it's always been happening.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Right.

Nate:

Yeah. It's hard to tell with this one how much is tongue-in-cheek and how much is a sincere adventure written by a kid. It very much feels like a comic book "Prince of Space", where we have our hero and the over-the-top villain who presumably are recurring characters through every story. I don't know. They trade some insults and they like shoot at each other with various science fiction rayguns. There's time rays and disruptors.

JM:

And at the end there's a Deus Ex machina thing that's like not been mentioned anywhere else, right? But the thing is, so I saw that and like obviously it's not great, but it reminded me of one of the few E. E. Doc Smith stories I read. I think it was called "The Vortex Blaster" and it was actually in an anthology added by Moskowitz and it had a very similar thing where there was like they had to deal with the bad guys or I think they were aliens or something like that. It was a spaceship and they, at the end of the story, like the last page, they had this, well, we better use the reality distorting bomb or something like that. And they did. And of course it was like, oh, well, it saved the day, but it was like this last resort that we didn't know about, so it needed to be called upon, right? So it was like very unsatisfying kind of story writing, sort of. So I mean, I guess, you know, he was just taking from that kind of stuff, right? And who knows how seriously he took it. He probably knew it was bullshit when he wrote it.

Gretchen:

It still has the charm, because I wanted to look also at other Planeteer zines that were up on the fanzine site. And there's just like the first one has like some very charming, like very kind of childish drawings for, and at the end there's, it looks like just in pencil written in cursive on the back, "Subscribe!" with like a big exclamation point, which just felt very, it was very sweet.

Nate:

It is, yeah.

JM:

Yeah. This one was interesting just in terms of knowing how Bush develops this fanzine of his system last very long, either.

Nate:

No, it didn't. He did other fanzines later. He was involved in writing articles, but yeah, 

Gretchen:

The Tesseract was one.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Right.

 Nate:

I think this one was hectographed. I can't even imagine what the process would be like. I'm sure it's messy and kind of difficult to do on your own.

JM:

Yeah, it sounds kind of messy.

Nate:

Yeah, certainly time consuming anyway. I'm assuming he's drawing and doing the graphic design all himself. So doing the layouts of the pages, all the stuff was more or less handwritten, and then I guess typed with a typewriter, I'm not entirely sure how he produced the text. But yeah.

JM:

Yeah. One of these bibliographies is kind of sarcastic and it kind of talks a little bit like smugly about how some of these people did their things and it mentions all the magazines that Blish started. It's like, he's the editor of and then it's names like a dozen different things and it's like kind of the suggestion is, well, each one of them had like what issue and then he's like, oh, I can't do this anymore.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Just started the next one. So yeah, pretty much that's great though. I mean, that's enthusiasm. You want to see that and somebody who's of that age in particular, right? You know, it's like it looks, you can, you can tell that so long as this burn it doesn't burn out, he's going to do cool stuff. And he does. So.

Nate:

And the enthusiasm is where it really shines through with the teenagers from the prose to the DIY layouts of all the pages that very much look like, you know, hand drawn during study hall or whatever. It's just very, I don't know, charming and adorable look at. 

(music: ominous synth)

Ralph Milne Farley - "The Rexmel" (1935)

Nate:

These fanzines also were in contact with the professionals and would publish some of their fiction from time to time. And presumably this is all stuff that got rejected from magazines like Amazing or Weird Tales or was stuff that was either too short or too much of a sketch to be submitted to something that would pay money for it. So a lot of the fanzines would probably pay a lesser amount to get some of these big names in their zines so they could advertise saying, oh, we have Clark Ashton Smith and our issue.

So we took a look at two of these stories and by far the shorter of the two is by a Ralph Milne Farley, who is an interesting figure in that he was a sitting state senator at the time that he wrote some of his science fiction.

JM:

It seems most famous for a series called the Radio Novels. I think they're called that in retrospect now, but it's like "Radio Planet", I should say.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

He had a bunch of books about the Radio Planet and I think they were serialized. I can't remember what magazine it was.

Nate:

Yeah. He had a bunch of stuff in Argosy.

Gretchen:

I know he had works in both Amazing and Astounding.

Nate:

He had a bunch of stuff, a whole bunch of places. But yeah, interesting, a senator while writing this stuff. So kind of an interesting intersection of careers that you don't really see too often in the genre.

Gretchen:

Yeah. He wrote political books under his real name and he would write sci-fi under the pseudonym.

Nate:

Yeah. So this is a pseudonym. His real name was Roger Sherman Hoar.

JM:

That sounds more like a senator name to me.

Nate:

Right. Yeah. He had a lengthy political and law career. You know, he got his law degree from Harvard, served in Massachusetts government for a while and he was also big into this science fiction stuff. So the story that he submitted to the Fantasy magazine that we read is "The Rexmel" and it's, again, very short. It's kind of a fun sailor's yarn and there is a superstition that when the rats all leave a ship before a ship starts on a voyage is a sign that the ship is going to be lost on that trip. So this is apparently due to a smell that a doomship gives off and this smell has been duplicated by a German chemist out of coal tar and he's testing it out as a commercial product. And the narrator sees the rats leaving a ship, the Mary B. So was it doomed or was it superstition or was it the Rexmel, which is the name of the product from wreck and smell, tries to fool his buddy saying that the newspaper reported it lost, but it really wasn't. Can you fool a rat? Who knows, maybe. I don't know. It's a neat, fun story. I don't really have too much to say about it.

JM:

Yeah, there's not much to say. A while ago, I got the complete short story set of Theodore Sturgeon and when we did the episode while back on radio stuff, we talked about his story, "Ether Breather". And I think I talked a little bit about the early days of Sturgeon and how he was writing for McClure's newspaper stuff. And a lot of the stories from that time now, it was really interesting because it was, he was obviously trying to find his voice and some stuff that he wrote was never published, like in the early 30s, it was only published later. And a lot of that stuff is like really sophisticated and cool, but a lot of the newspaper stuff is very like, I don't know, it's weird, like it's well written enough, but it has this kind of this, I don't know, like it feels like it has a, it's just trying to be a cute, silly story or have an agenda or like maybe slightly patriotic or something like that. Like it's, it feels, I don't know, it's hard to explain, but it feels like something I would imagine seeing in a newspaper. 

Nate:

Now that you say that it almost like it does feel like a newspaper piece.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I think that that does feel like the way it would, it would be.

JM:

Yeah. I mean, it's just kind of an odd contribution to, to a science fiction fanzine, I thought actually.

Nate:

I think they are there more chasing the name than the actual story itself, I'd imagine, because a lot of these would advertise in other fanzine saying, check out our next issue. We have stories by this big author, that big author.

JM:

Farley. Yeah. Yeah. I guess. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it just seems like, why wouldn't he write something like more fantastical and weird? Like he's, he's just in this DIY fanzine, right? Like he'd do whatever he wants. I don't know.

Gretchen:

Yes. Like maybe the editors were just like, whatever you have on hand, we'll, we'll take.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah. I guess so.

Nate:

That's probably what it was.

JM:

I mean, to be honest, I haven't read anything else by him. So maybe he's just like that. But I don't know. I did read a little bit about him and it seems like he has some other stuff that sounds interesting and different. So I don't know. I mean, it's maybe it's a prestige thing. You're probably right. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's what, yeah.

(music: otherworldly electromagnetic waves)

Clark Ashton Smith - "The Primal City" (1934)

Nate:

Certainly some other more prominent authors would come up in these zines who are still well regarded today. Then the other one we took a look at from this category is Clark Ashton Smith, "Primal City".

JM:

Yeah. He has a story submission in the Fantasy Fan. So this isn't really the way that I thought that we would introduce Clark Ashton Smith to the podcast. So I'm going to, I guess I'm going to ramble a bit. I have a lot to say about Clark Ashton Smith. He's a writer I've been very familiar with for over 20 years now, I guess. And I like him a lot. I consider him a favorite. I love his prose. I think at his best, he's just like beautiful, macabre, dark, twisted, decadent, so, so good.

I don't think this story represents that. I think that I will open this by saying, okay, I know at least one regular listener of the podcast or semi-regular listener is a big Clark Ashton Smith fan. And I need to preamble this by saying I consider myself one too, but I think that that being a fan sometimes means that you might be willing to criticize somebody that you really respect as a writer and you like a lot. And although I don't necessarily mean to be overly critical of Smith because I think I understand why he did what he did. I do think sometimes that writing fiction for him was an exercise and a money-making thing. Like, I don't, sometimes I don't think his heart was really in it.

I think his heart was really in poetry and that's what he wanted to do. And that's where, like, his best fiction, actually, even though it's prose, reads very much like poetry. And I think that, like, even though his science fiction stories are very inventive and very creative, I don't think this is really the area where he wanted to excel. And I think sometimes that he was a very frustrated person. He was part of the Weird Tales agglomeration with Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Those three are always mentioned in more or less the same breath.

Clark Ashton Smith outlived all his friends. He lived till 1961, I believe, and he had long since stopped writing fiction by then. Nearly all his fiction writing is basically from 1931, 1930 till 1937 when Lovecraft died. He and Lovecraft were really big friends. They never met in person, but they wrote letters back and forth all the time.

Smith spent most of his life in the Auburn, California area, and this is where he had his home. This is where his family lived. He was actually a person of many trades. Obviously, you know, writing was something that meant a lot to him, but more so poetry than prose. He actually published his first book of poetry in 1912, and even now, some people consider it a really excellent work of poetry, and I would say that his poetry honestly stands really strong. I mean, I'm not necessarily an expert in poetry, I don't necessarily pretend to have vast knowledge of the great poets and stuff, but I think that he was far better than many of his contemporaries, certainly a better poet than Lovecraft was. I think, as well as the writing, he had a lot of artistic endeavors that not a lot of people appreciated.

Jack Williamson actually talks about this in his autobiography, when he talks about going to Auburn with some of his friends, I think including Edmond Hamilton to meet Clark Aston and Smith, and Smith took him to his upper loft where he had all his grotesque carvings, and these are things that he made out of wood that you can see pictures of online now, and apparently some of them are every now and then they go up for sale, and they fetch quite an amount because they're original and grotesque and strange, I guess, but Williamson wasn't very impressed, he didn't seem to see a lot in what Smith had become with this really eccentric loner, old guy living in the middle of nowhere in this desert area of California. 

It seems like during his life he tried his hand at a few other professions too, including a lot of heavy manual labor stuff like mining and so forth, he was really unable to earn a satisfactory living by writing even though it was something that he really wanted to do, and I think sometimes you can tell in his fiction he recycles a lot of ideas, but those ideas are really cool, and I think if you get the best sampling of those ideas, you are in for a really, really awesome ride, and you're in for some really exciting, beautiful, powerfully weird stories. I think Smith, at his best, his stories often tell of things like a person losing their identity or losing their being from some means or another, and sometimes it has to do with telepathic stuff, sometimes it has to do with weird biology, like Hodgson, he was very into not necessarily fungus, but like plant animal hybrid creatures. He has this like some of the artwork that he drew, he also did illustrations, and it reflects a lot of these things, like really weird minglings of the vegetable and animal species, and a lot of his stories depict that, in really awesome, decadent, creepy ways.  Also things like basically memory and ideas of memory and what it means to remember things from long ago and or strange points in space and time, human beings having experiences of the otherworldly and of the alien and then coming back to Earth and basically not being able to function anymore in society, because now they've been exposed to so much, and so their brains have been so expanded or their senses so enhanced that when they return to the world of humans, now suddenly everybody thinks they're an idiot because they can't function.

That kind of stuff that Smith wrote so well, and so many weird alien landscapes, he has this series about a place called "Zothique" that's supposed to be the last continent on the Earth when everything else is sunk under the ocean and the sun is ancient and flickering and old, and "Zothique" is full of wizards and sorcerers and necromancy, so much necromancy. So morbid, but I think the first story I ever read from him was a story called "The Isle of the Torturers" and it was a story about this king who gets shipwrecked at sea with all his servants who were escaping a plague on his kingdom and they end up shipwrecked on this island and the people of the island are depraved and they just want to torture them and put them through as much hell as they possibly can. Unlike Lovecraft, Smith loves describing just how horrible things are and the actual extent of all the horrible things his characters are going through to the point where Weird Tales had to tone him down many times and I actually, I'm going to call upon for our upcoming talk actually the collection fiction of Clark Ashton Smith which is available in five volumes and like the Conan series that Nate was talking about earlier in the episode, there's a lot of extra material that goes into the creation of the stories, lots of clips from letters and different things. It's pretty much the ideal way for anybody who's really interested in Clark Ashton Smith but maybe who's already read like a sampling of the best stories in some anthology or collection somewhere to really, really dive in because if you read all these volumes you actually will see his weaknesses, you will see how he recycles a lot of his same ideas and you will see the stories that he obviously wrote for money and yes, even though it may not have been much money, this was the 1930s, people do what they can.

I think getting that sort of perspective of getting beyond the oh wow this like he's awesome right and he is but I guess it's really fascinating to get to know some of the details and I guess just to give you a feeling of the Clark Ashton Smith style, I will just read the opening of the story of the Primal City here.

Now I will say to start with this is not Clark Ashton Smith at his best, I don't necessarily think that highly of this story, I like it, I mean it's a pretty traditional weird tale but I mean in the sense to that traditional feeling comes from experience of things that came later, it does feel like a distillation of a lot of things and Lovecraft really liked it as we'll see. 

This story starts with this passage: 

"In these after-days, when all things are touched with insoluble doubt and dereliction, I am not sure of the purpose that had taken us into that little visited land. I recall, however, that we had found explicit mention, in a volume of which we possessed the one existing copy, of certain vast prehuman ruins lying amid the bare plateaus and stark pinnacles of the region. How we had acquired the volume I do not know; but Sebastian Polder and I had given our youth and much of our man hood to the quest of hidden knowledge; add this book was a compendium of all things that men have forgotten or ignored in their desire to repudiate the inexplicable."

So yeah this is a story about two guys who travel into South America's, no I think it's Africa.

Nate:

I thought it was India.

JM:

Yeah and they're looking for a lost city, a lost civilization and they find it and of course there's a force there that they can understand that destroys their minds and the story is shrouded in an atmosphere of, I guess loss and kind of like what I was saying earlier like a kind, of the one survivor doesn't even remember a lot about what got him there, and I think the story itself isn't great but what I think that Smith does here that kind of reflects a lot of his his general work, is this kind of feeling of like yeah like the mind has been so affected that at this point it's so dreamy and haze-like. I think some of my favorite experiences of reading in you know discovering Smith for the first time, and I don't know after having a few puffs and just really getting into the atmosphere of Smith at his best, and this story did kind of bring back a little bit of that feeling to me even though it's not necessarily him and his best and I think part of that is Smith writing in the contemporary milieu like nowadays or well 1930s I don't think that's really where he excels.

Not everybody agrees, interestingly enough, SD Joshi when he selects Smith stories to include in his anthologies it's often the one set in his time and I kind of find that interesting but I actually obviously what stories an editor selects to include in an anthology tell you a lot about that person and maybe Joshi just likes the the contemporary weird more.

I think Smith excels in the really strange settings entirely like entirely dedicated to that and set in an alien world in ancient Atlantis or Hyboria or Zothique or whatever and and it's a strange place where you don't know what you're going to encounter. That said Smith and Lovecraft in their letters they like to share their dreams with one another and Lovecraft had described several of his recent dreams to Clark Ashton Smith which made Smith write the following:

"My own recent dreams have been pretty tame; but in the past I have had some that were memorable. One that comes to mind was fraught with all the supernatural horror of antique myth: I was standing somewhere on a bleak, terrible plain, while past me and over me, with appalling demonic speed and paces and voices of thunder, there swept a vast array of cloudy, titanic Shapes. One of these, as it went by, pealed out the sonorous words 'Eiton euclarion' which I somehow took to be the name of the cloudy entity or one of its fellows"

And Smith said that this was a dream that he had when he was a boy. And in his return letter, Lovecraft wrote that,

"Your unusual dreams are tremendously interesting, and much fuller of genuine, unhackneyed strangeness than any of mine. 'Eiton euclarion', but what festering horror and space-time makeup have you had of veiled intimation?"

So Smith has this cool thing that he called the Black Book, and if you go to eldritchdark.com right now, which is the official Clark Ashton Smith website. I haven't checked recently, but when I used to go there, you can see an index of every story that Clark Ashton Smith wrote, including ones that he never finished. And those are excerpted from the Black Book, and what it is, it's his idea book, and it's really neat because you can see, so Clark Ashton Smith, you know, I've said a few things about him, and from my observations, one of the things that I notice is he seems to have had a problem with his attention span, like he tried his hand at a longer work called the "Infernal Star", and he got to about 12,000 words and then quit. And that would be the longest piece of fiction that he actually wrote if it was published. So everything that Smith published is short. He doesn't even have anything as lengthy as "At the Mountains of Madness", for example, from Lovecraft. And it just seems like he had so many ideas for stories and so many things that he just like jotted down in a fever and that never, like never came to fruition. So like if you're just looking to push your creativity, you know, you can look at the Black Book and see all the cool ideas that Smith had that didn't use.

So this one is under the title of "The Cloud People", and he says, "It's a remote mountain region with lost cities and treasure deserted by human beings, but guarded by strange clouds that take the forms of men, animals, or demons." So the story was written in the early part of 1934, and he submitted it to Weird Tales twice under the title of "The Cloud Things" and "The Clouds", and finally "The Primal City", and it was rejected. And Farnsworth Wright said the story was lacking plot.

Nate:

Well, yeah.

JM:

And Smith pretty much elsewhere said, "Not very many of my stories exhibit what is known in Pulpdom as plot", and that's very true. And if you read that collected Smith appendage series, you will see that Smith actually got many rejections and many of his stories were not, and he had to work on them and work on them to make them acceptable to this market. And again, like that's not to say that Smith was better or worse than the market, but perhaps just not suited. And I remember reading his comments about Astounding, and I think I mentioned that early on is he thought that Astounding was too geared toward the adventure pulp thing, and he tried to write stories like that, and the editors would sort of highlight the things that he was least interested in as being the things that they wanted to see more of.

And I get both perspectives because they would say to him things like, we're interested in human characters and human elements of a story. And Smith would fire back something like, "Well, if you want humans, then why don't you just like, why are you writing science fiction?" Not something else, right? I guess he was just wanting to make it strange, and he didn't care about having things like identifiable characters, and that was something that at least some of the magazines at the time were pretending to, they were pretending to, I guess, have an inkling towards, right? Like they wanted to see their magazines grow up and be considered literary, right? So to have things like characters that you could identify with seemed important, whereas Smith is all atmosphere. So he wrote the story again in March 1934, and again, was rejected. He and Lovecraft commiserated with each other a lot. And Lovecraft was being cute. So he wrote to him, "the nameless spawn of Yub & Yoth!", on reading the second rejection letter. And he said, "no wonder his damn'd magazine never prints anything worth reading, except by accident."

Lovecraft goes on to praise the story, and he talks about how good he thinks it is. And I kind of wonder if this story is a lot like Lovecraft, more so than I think what Smith is best at. So he submitted it finally to the Fantasy Ffan, which Lovecraft recommended. So the story did not get accepted by Weird Tales, but it did end up in the November 1934 issue of the Fantasy Fan, which was being run by Hornig at this time.

Nate:

Yeah, I guess a couple of these zines were attached to people that had industry ties, but presumably they could use some of the same equipment in running these off.

JM:

So interestingly, the story was also reprinted in Comet Stories in 1940. And the editor made several changes, which are very strange. And the compilers of the Smith collection note this. They cite an example where Smith wrote, "their swiftness was that of mountain-sweeping winds". And the editor of Comet changed it to "their swiftness was that of powered aircraft." So yeah, I mean, needless to say, we don't need to read that surviving manuscript. I don't know what happened there.

But yeah, somebody, I guess Smith again, he probably was trying to sell all his leftovers. And unfortunately, making money seems to have been a struggle for him. It seems like based on, he's also mentioned a bit in de Camp's autobiography. And from there, from bits I've read and even like sort of good nature, criticisms by Lovecraft, it seems like Smith had a pretty high lifestyle. He liked to drink and he liked to court women and he liked, I don't know, he's into things that Lovecraft and Howard were not into he never I don't know, he always seemed to be hanging around in that like Northern California area. But he definitely seems to be a bit more of a decadent lover of the world kind of person living a bit like that. So Lovecraft said that he perhaps had a bit too much of an affinity for wine, women and song. This is Lovecraft, of course, so you can take that as you will, but it's just it's kind of interesting that yeah, he seems to have really struggled with this, but his stories at their best are really, really good.

This is not him at his best, but I can see why having it printed in the Fantasy Fan would have been really cool to see a story by Clark Ashton Smith. It's not terrible by any means, I mean, just these these guys getting their doom coming to them because they dare to pry into forbidden lore, like as with a lot of stories like this, I have questions like I kind of wanted to know more about how it started like you really don't get like it's almost as though the journey of going there and being exposed to whatever the cloud people are damaged the guy's brain so we can't really remember even like it's almost like he's living in this perpetual nightmare now or his life almost starts with going to the city and he has these big recollections of some book and it's like we don't really know what book it is, but it's a book that contains all these hidden secrets and I don't know I liked it like that that was really haunting. It was just sort of perfunctory like as far as stories like this go, there's definitely better ones. And as far as Smith goes, I wouldn't really start with this even though we're doing we are starting with this on the podcast, but like I would have gone somewhere else probably if we were specifically gearing for Smith and I do actually have an idea for a planetary romance type episode where I think we can incorporate Clark Ashton Smith and his one of his Martian stories, C. L. Moore and her Martian stories and a Leigh Brackett story. I think that would be a great Chrononauts episode. I don't know about you guys.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. But yeah, you know, I definitely didn't mind this at all. I actually quite like it. I mean, nothing happens. It's just kind of atmospheric vibes for a couple thousand words, but you know that that's totally fine.

Gretchen:

Yeah, this is actually my first Smith. I do have a copy of a collection of his stories, which is edited by Joshi. So I wonder how that his tastes do affect the the selection of that.

JM:

Yeah, well, I remember you telling me the contents and I commented on that and I said, well, he's included a lot of the like contemporary stories and I noticed too in some anthologies he edited like he includes, I don't know, I mean, I like I'm not I'm not saying that these stories are bad and "The Dark Eidolon" definitely includes a lot of the weird other worldly ones too. But it just seems like Joshi focuses a lot on the that now like the stories set at the here and now that almost could have been Lovecraft stories. And I don't really think that that's the best that Smith has to offer. I think really Smith excels at these weird hallucinogenic landscapes and like, okay, one of his stories is a really short story about these two guys from Atlantis who are like the last survivors of Atlantis and they build a ship to travel into space and they go to Venus and they call it something else, of course, but they go to Venus and they're all happy to be on Venus and they can breathe there. So they're so uplifted and wonderfully overcome that they start like cavorting around and playing around and as this is happening, the story describes how they're very slowly being covered by flowers and turning into plant people. And at the end of the story, they're plants and they're not the same people that they were when they started. And like they're totally oblivious, but Smith is describing this happening and it's just a few page long story, but it's so good and so trippy and weird. And that's the stuff that he's really good at, I think.

Nate:

Cool, yeah, I didn't really have too much on this one. I mean, there's not much there aside from atmosphere, but I did enjoy it. The far off landscapes and alien worlds are definitely more...

JM:

Yeah. And there's a glimpse of that in this story.

Nate:

There is, yeah.

JM:

And you got to see the weird city, but it's just a glimpse. In terms of writing, I think it's like it's the story that goes smoothest in this batch, but that's not really saying too much, I guess. So yeah. And there is a weird throw away description of the natives too, which Smith doesn't usually do. Like he's usually a bit more classy than that, I think, but I don't know. It's a little bit of time, I guess, but yeah, it's just kind of a subhuman or something he describes them. So I don't know, usually is a bit better than that. Yeah. Yeah.

Gretchen:

I did also want to mention the Fantasy Fan magazine that it was published in was one of the magazines that is known for campaigning for more recognition of Hodgson, which is really cool. Hornig, I believe, who did have a lot of experience with Weird Tales more so than it seems the others seemed really interested in weird fiction.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah. And there were, that came up actually in the material a few times too was people debating about whether weird fiction should be included and like talking about the number of weird fiction readers versus the number of science fiction readers and stuff like that.

And that's something that still was a factor many years later. I mean, I mentioned this when we talked about "Vintage Season" by Moore and Kuttner and the first time I had heard of Moore and I had been reading some stories and I was telling Howie from Cauldron Bourne, Britton Rites, kind of a buddy of mine, we were talking about it. And, and I was saying, oh, I read this story "Vintage Season" and I didn't know it was going to be like this, but it was really awesome science fiction. And it was kind of his opinion that they were, she in particular, switched to writing science fiction because it was more profitable. And that was kind of, I don't know, he seemed to wish that she stuck to the sword and sorcery planetary romance kind of stuff and I don't agree, but I can see, I can see the point of view, I guess, like, I think she was really good at the more thoughtful science fiction kind of stories. I really liked the Northwest Smith stories that she wrote set on Mars, but every single one of them deals with like space vampires of some kind, like it's a very repetitive. It's good. It's really, really good, but it's like, you want to read like maybe one story a month or something like that at most, because otherwise you'll be like, they're all the same. Like, you know, the space vampire women and stuff and like.

Nate:

Yeah, how the genre question does come up in these zines is pretty interesting. Because the Fantasy Fan does make a specific remark that they don't want to publish science fiction. They want to focus specifically on weird fiction stuff.

Gretchen:

Yeah, yeah, because they say they don't want to compete with the Science Fiction Digest.

Nate:

Right. Yeah.

Gretchen:

Although it does seem like it's more just the Hornig had Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft and Derleth stories. So he's like, I might as well focus on weird fiction.

 Nate:

Yeah. And Clark Ashton Smith does get published a lot in the fantasy fan. There were a couple others that we could have done for this episode. I want to do this one because it does kind of focus on an alien city and it does tie in a bit to the whole ancient aliens thing, though it doesn't really pop up that much. Again, almost nothing happens in the story. It's just like a weird atmosphere.

JM:

Yeah. And I think these magazines don't have conscientious editors from elsewhere going, hey, I like your writing, but you need to fix this and this and tighten up the plot of a story and this and that. I think that's kind of one of the reasons why fan fiction sometimes is such a dicey proposition is they don't have that kind of... There's something to be said for the Campbell or the Hornig or whatever, like kind of figure standing over your shoulder going, well, that's not good. You can do this better.

Nate:

Right. Yeah.

JM:

Farnsworth Wright rejected a lot of Clark Ashton Smith stories. He rejected quite a few Robert E. Howard stories too. "The Vale of Lost Women" was never published in Weird Tales because he knew it was a bad Conan story and racist as hell. And it's just like you have somebody overseeing that that's not necessarily a dedicated fan. I mean, maybe they are, but they also have an outside interest, I guess, and they're not going to play favorites necessarily and just publish any old thing. So I mean, you know, it's nothing, I mean, it's pretty much what I expected this time around. Like I didn't really expect there to be any literary masterpieces and I've read most of Clark Ashton Smith's stuff, but "The Primal City" is not one that I had got to until now. So it was one of the few stories that I hadn't read and I don't know why, because it's not like I was reading them in the magazines, so I didn't see them in Weird Tales and Wonder Stories, which is where a lot of them were published. But I guess, I don't know, sometimes you just don't get to even after 20 years.

So yeah, read "The Dark Eidolon" or something, get a really good Smith collection. And if you really like what you read, then you can get these volumes of the complete ones and you'll find some gems that are not in the more general compilations. You will. And later on, like many writers, he did seem to be getting a little more into science fiction later on, but he didn't write much after the 30s. There's only a few stories from the 40s and 50s, and most of them are not that notable. But there's a couple that I really like. There's one called the "Schizoid Creator" about this guy who's trying to find God by performing electroshock type experiments on demons, basically, and that's, I thought, was really cool. There's just not a lot of stuff after that time. So I think after his buddies who were hanging out in Weird Tales, writing letters and stuff, like they kind of stopped being around and a couple of them died really horribly, I think he just lost a lot of interest in writing fiction, unfortunately. So it's the way it goes.

(music: "Falling Star" by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth on bright synths)

George Hamm - "Cluck Rogers in Astounding" (1936)

Nate:

I guess before we take a break, we just want to cover one story real quick that's going to tie into the story after that. And that is going to speak to the question of fan fiction and kind of where does it begin. So there is this parody piece called "Cluck Rogers in Astounding" that was published in the Fantasy Fiction Telegram in December of 1936 by a George Hamm. And we were talking before the recording about, you know, who is George Hamm and couldn't really turn up anything. It might not even be a real name.

JM:

I thought I came up with, I thought I saw him mentioned again somewhere. It could well be a pseudonym. I don't know. I'm not entirely sure.

Nate:

But this one is basically a, I don't know, it kind of follows like a script... 

JM:

Like a almost radio play or something.

Nate:

Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And stage directions and, you know, music cues and all that. And, you know, it's very much clearly science fiction parody that is playing on Buck Rogers. And, you know, we get some insults traded between Cluck Rogers and the main villain Killer Cohen. And this all takes place in the office of Astounding magazine. And we get lots of in-jokes to the science fiction community.

JM:

Yeah. It didn't make me laugh once. It was historically interesting though.

Nate:

It was. Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah. There's one story that's mentioned, and I was curious to see what it was where the villain is like, don't make me read you "Finality Unlimited", and it's written by Donald Wandrei in Astounding issue September 196. And I wanted to look it up because I wanted to see what that Bleiler said about it. He calls it "competently done."

JM:

Yeah, you know, now that you mention it, I remembered and I was going to, I was going to look for that and I forgot to look for it. So yeah.

Gretchen:

I just, knowing how Bleiler sometimes feels about works, I wanted to see what he had said about it. So seems he enjoys it fairly well.

Nate:

Yeah. It is interesting what stories come up as far as what people are making fun of and what they're praising. Abraham Merritt came up a lot in the zine excerpts as like one of the best pulp authors around and a lot of people really like E. E. Doc Smith as well. But yeah, some of these other stories just get kind of slammed, possibly unfairly.

JM:

I guess I didn't get some of the jokes. Like, I don't know why they linked Buck Rogers with Astounding, necessarily, because he was published in Amazing, right? So I don't know. I don't, I don't really, like, I definitely felt like I wasn't quite sure. I wasn't quite the target audience, but I don't know. I did appreciate the historical quality of it, but also that it was like the dialogue really kind of did, it kind of felt like something from a nowadays parody, right? Like it was very contemporary feeling, goofing off about like the conventions and the weird techno babble and the rays that do nothing and the, I don't know, it was just very, it felt familiar.

Gretchen:

Also, the jokes about advertisements.

Nate:

Yeah, a lot of very in community jokes, I mean, I'm sure the advertisements and the magazines were annoying to the fans. I don't know exactly how much radio stuff was science fiction adjacent at this time, but certainly there were films, which I'm sure they loaded up with advertisements at the beginning as well. Yeah, it does feel very much like it could be a, well, I guess it does have some similarities with modern fan fiction parodies and that it is very self-referential in that way. And there's lots of jokes to stuff that is related to the community.

JM:

And I didn't mention like when I first kind of got the internet, I did, I was kind of looking into fan fiction a fair bit too. And I found a lot of Doctor Who fan fiction and I found Usenet news groups. You mentioned Usenet earlier, Nate.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

You know, like I found a group specifically devoted to X-Files fan fiction.

Nate:

Oh yeah, no, fan fiction was huge on Usenet.

JM:

Yeah. And it was like, there was so much. And I remember being in grade nine, I think, and I had like access to Usenet through a BBS or something. And it was like, everything was text based and it was all through a Linux shell on my DOS computer. And like, you know, I was getting all these X-Files stories that people had written. And Gretchen, you'll be interested in this. The first time I heard of Quantum Leap was because of an X-Files Quantum Leap crossover story. So. Yeah. More on that later. Crossovers, that is. I mean, I didn't like, like, I didn't think this was funny, but I could, I could totally imagine it as a radio play.

Nate:

Definitely. Yeah. It's written that way, more or less. Yeah.

Gretchen:

I didn't really find it that funny. I did appreciate some of the jokes, but I didn't really laugh at them.

JM:

Yeah. I mean, I imagined saying some of the lines and then over the top way, and that was kind of funny to me personally. Just, you know, like imagine them being set out like that. But. Yeah. But other than that, it didn't really make me laugh.

Gretchen:

We'll have to perform it.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah. And I will say the description of the Astounding offices does sound kind of a little bit true to form after reading the Astounding book, talking about like Campbell working in the back of the office and how everybody had to squeeze through like all this, these huge stacks of like paper and rolls of paper and like the Astounding office was in the very back of this messy room and like, this is, yeah, I don't know, it sounds like an interesting working environment to say the least, maybe not necessarily bad, but and like meanwhile, you're not allowed to smoke in there. And it's the 1930s and everybody like really wants to smoke, especially John Campbell. You're not allowed to smoke because there's so much paper that could like catch fire instantly. Yeah. I don't know. It's fun.

Nate:

Yeah. Interesting snapshot. I don't really have too much to say about it again. Super short.

JM:

Yeah. And again, shows how prevalent parody was even early on.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

It's not as entertaining to me as it was like, and I just kind of remember like, again, it got me thinking on the other thing that I found at that time was like Star Trek parodies. And there was some guy I can't remember, you know, he had one of those like typical internet handles of the time, but he wrote Star Trek TNG parodies of like several of the episodes specifically. And I remember really enjoying those, but like now I don't think I could read anything like that. Like, it would feel like a total waste of time and yeah, I don't know. Parody and spoof is, I think for a lot of us, it's the kind of thing that sounds really great when you're like younger, but I don't know, I think maybe as you get more exposed to stories, those kind of things lose their appeal for a lot of us. I know for me, like, Hitchhiker's Guide is probably like the extent of my, I can see that that's a really fun lampooning of some of the tropes and stuff like that, and I really enjoy it. But much further than that, and I start to be like, yeah, okay, like, I get it, you're trying to be funny and that's cool, but

Nate:

Yeah. Hitchhiker's Guide can be a little bit sometimes.

JM:

Yeah, yeah, it is true.

Nate:

Well, I guess with that, should we take a quick break?

JM:

Yeah, take a quick break and we'll talk about Star Trek, okay?

Nate:

Yeah, yeah, all right.

(music: spacey ambiance)

Ruth Berman - "Star Drek" (1968)

Nate:

So I guess one of the questions I wanted to answer and get at with this episode, because we've been focusing on the fan community and fanzines is where does fanfiction start? I mean, there's a clear difference between modern fanfiction and what Jules Verne was doing with Edgar Allan Poe. But where does that distinction begin and where does it end and what are the transition points? The "Cluck Rogers" piece we just talked about is an interesting kind of parody, but fan fiction that's played with a straight face or not done as like an over-the-top spoof seems to not really develop until Star Trek in its modern form. And that we have independent authors publishing things in independent zines using the IP of somebody else. And all the other instances of fanfiction we've seen kind of beforehand with the, I guess, one major exception of Sherlock Holmes have been these random one-offs. Whereas with Star Trek it was almost like a movement that just sprung up in the wake of the TV show. Which I think is just really fascinating as a turning point for both the genre history from a, not only from a literary standpoint, but from a fandom standpoint. Here you have for, again, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes, really the first time that people are publishing their own versions of established franchises and trading them with other fans and publishing them for fans to read. It doesn't seem to be a thing before this, aside from maybe some of the parodies like "Cluck Rogers".

So I guess the story we're taking a look at tonight is possibly the first example of Star Trek fan fiction. It's always hard to quantify what first is, but this was "Star Drek" written by Ruth Berman. The title gave me like the image of like a Mad Magazine parody where it's like shredding the show or something like that.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, I don't understand. Is that the title that she gave to her own work?

Nate:

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure why.

JM:

It certainly doesn't predispose her to being enamored with the work.

Nate:

No, yeah, but she was. She really was. And this was initially published in Pantopon #16, which was Berman's own fanzine, and then it was later republished in Spockanalia #1 in 1968, which was edited by Devra Langsam.

Gretchen:

Langsam and Sherna Comerford.

Nate:

Right, yeah. Pantopon wasn't a Star Trek fanzine specifically. It was kind of Berman's own zine that was primarily like correspondence and her opinions on various things, but Spockanalia is definitely a dedicated Star Trek fanzine. And this is interestingly the only piece in here which kind of resembles modern fan fiction. The rest of it is like fictional nonfiction, like there's profiles of various elements of the Star Trek world that are just kind of like fans making their own stuff up. But it's an interesting publication in that it is a very early example and possibly the first example of not only a Star Trek fanzine, but of Star Trek fanfiction.

And there's a really good interview on YouTube with both Ruth Berman and Devra Langsam on the same YouTube channel that runs the archive of fanzines. And they talk a lot about the Spockanalia zine and their involvement with the first Star Trek convention, which apparently just drew huge numbers beyond the general science fiction conventions. I guess it was such a cultural phenomenon that it drew in a huge amount of new fans into the science fiction genre where not only did it need its own convention, but it kind of outperformed a lot of the other general science fiction conventions.

And I guess one comment that Berman made regarding the nature of fan fiction is that she said that in the early 1930s fanzines that we were talking about earlier tonight, a lot of the fiction authors realized that good stories could be sold to professional magazines and you'd get paid for them. And stories that couldn't be sold typically were not good and nobody wants to read a story that isn't good. So there was a tendency over time to see less original fiction in the fanzines, but when Star Trek came around there was intellectual property and licensing issues. And with the huge influx of new fans, there is a huge demand for more Star Trek stories, especially after the show went off the air. So the independent fanzine format was kind of a natural fit for that demand.

JM:

Yeah, so that James Blish first tie-in novel, "Spock Must Die", that was published in 1970. So that was pretty soon after the official end of the season three of the original Star Trek series. It took Doctor Who the same amount of time basically to start, like while the show was on, there were no official continuation novels. There were the novelizations of the TV stories, but there were no like independent series of novels. But then as soon as the show got off the air, a couple years later, you know, we got to start this, right? And it seems like it was the same deal with Star Trek. Yeah, there was a Pocket books line that really took off in the 80s and that was very regular. But it seems like in the 70s, there were quite a few published somewhat irregularly.

Nate:

So this just a scale of the numbers and the fans involved with Star Trek versus what we saw in the 1920s and 30s. They estimate that about 5,000 copies were printed of each issue of Spockanalia, which for a fanzine is like huge.

JM:

That's a lot.

Nate:

It's almost unthinkable. I think a lot of the pulp magazines had circulations that were only maybe one order of magnitude larger than that. Certainly the fanzines that we were talking about earlier tonight had circulations of probably no more than a couple dozen. Some maybe not even that high.

JM:

Probably not even sometimes.

Nate:

Yeah, so definitely enormous numbers in scales that were probably not seen in the science fiction community again until Star Wars came around. I would imagine. But by that time, there was already a huge fandom landscape of media franchises having fanzines and active fan communities tied to that specific media property. Whereas with Star Trek, it feels like it's something new that it had a huge amount of fans specifically tied to the Star Trek property. I'm not exactly sure why that is like why Star Trek and not like Flash Gordon or I don't know. It's just one of those unanswered questions that I don't have a good way at getting at, I think.

JM:

I don't really have an answer to that either.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I have heard, it's hard to, I guess, see if this is like the legitimate reason. But it is, I've seen a lot of people attribute the popularity of Star Trek fandom to how women responded to the series. And sort of housewives who would be at home and would see the series reacted to the series.

JM:

And could it also be that it's a thing of the 1960s, right? And it's a thing of that specific time period. And being a show that, I guess, had a, if you want to believe William Shatner and Gene Roddenberry, anyway, a mandate of, I guess, showing that people like Uhura or Chekov could be important and could be, you know, have important positions on a starship traveling the galaxy.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Stuff like that.

Gretchen:

I mean, Uhura is the first African-American character in television to not be just like a maid or a servant or something. She's a legitimate part of the crew.

Nate:

Yeah. And the women in Star Trek fandom is an interesting angle in that it's a total inversion from what we saw of the 1930s fanzines when there were almost no women mentioned at all in any of the pages. Whereas in Spockanalia, all the content is pretty much written by women, which I thought was pretty interesting.

JM:

Yeah. It is quite something like, I don't know if television, especially being like a very different medium and maybe being perceived as more, I guess, for the masses, right? Like, and there's more involvement from all sorts of people who are not necessarily, again, like they're not necessarily fans. They're not necessarily 100% committed to the thing, but they, their influences and their, their way of thinking does enough to contribute a little bit to the whole. And television has always been more, I mean, somebody like me who doesn't watch a lot of television saying this, but like television has always been more accessible than stuff that people read a lot of the time.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

It's just that by the 60s, that was very much a thing. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just the way it is. So.

Nate:

Yeah. So I mean, with this one, it's interesting in that it is, it's a crossover.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

So I haven't read "The Faerie Queene". Have either of you?

JM:

No.

Gretchen:

No.

 JM:

It was certainly mentioned a lot in this. The author, it seems to be a big fan of it.

Nate:

Yeah. No, definitely. And it gets mentioned all the time in the English canon. And it's one of those books that I would like to read at some point. It's really, really, really long. I think it's like 400,000 word range.

Gretchen:

So several volumes isn't there?

Nate:

Yeah. Something like around 1000 pages, maybe a little longer. But from all the reviews, it seems like it's an enjoyable read, not something like "Clarissa", which I also haven't read, but apparently it's just an insufferable slog that goes on for 1000 pages. So I don't know. This is basically the Star Trek crew finds their way into "The Faerie Queene".

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

I would probably get the references more if I read it, but I wasn't going to read a 400,000 word text to prepare for a fanfiction story.

JM:

I mean, I'm sure it would be more like, I don't know, maybe it would be less perfunctory than reading this, like as the longest work in the episode of fiction, I struggled with this. I didn't really enjoy reading it. I don't know. I guess, you know, it's just one of those things, right? Like the fan fiction. I don't know. And then I came across something that I thought was pretty cool. But yeah, it's just, it's, I've always, you know, like when I started developing an interest because yeah, I just wanted to read more Doctor Who stories, right? Because there weren't enough. And it was interesting. But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't go back there a lot of the time. And I don't know, just kind of gave me that feeling. Like I laughed a few times and I got impatient a bunch of times. A lot of things were interesting. Like, you know, she was definitely playing out the Spock + Uhura angle. Like, like it was kind of interesting to know that that was very, very definitely on the minds of fans at that time, it seems.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Like, I kind of wondered if that was a more modern thing. I mean,

Gretchen:

No, I'm pretty sure that in another Spockanalia, they do talk about like, well, Kirk and Spock as well. It seems to prevent romantic angles right from the start.

Nate:

Yeah. And in that interview on YouTube, they basically say that the smut slash fanfiction was written almost immediately, it was just not published in some of the fanzines because some of the editors were too embarrassed, but they circulated copies of it anyway in secret.

JM:

That's really interesting. I guess I've always been a little bit, I don't know what the right word is. Like it's a weird fascination because it's not really, like this whole wanting to see a character that you envision because you see them on a TV program or something like, you know, engaged in relationships that aren't really featured extensively in the show, but you just like want to see those characters do those things. So you write these stories and it's like, I don't know. It's odd to me because I've never really thought about somebody else's character like that. Like maybe somebody, I don't know. It's, it's, it's interesting. It's interesting. I don't know what I'm trying to say. Like people, people have odd fantasies, I guess that I can't personally relate to, but I find still very interesting.

Gretchen:

I think a part of it comes from just relating heavily to characters and perhaps wanting to live vicariously through them or being very invested in certain characters and wanting that from, from like a story, I guess.

Nate:

Certainly reflections of personal fantasy that come in in a lot of these stories, I would say.

Gretchen:

Yeah. It is very well known that a lot of women were attracted to Spock right from the beginning.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

I do remember hearing this story where after "The Naked Time" episode when Spock first expresses emotions and he breaks down that there was apparently, after that aired, he got like tons of fanmail from women who were very invested in that. It's sort of this idea of like, oh, well, you know, I could be the person to make him feel emotions in a way.

JM:

Yeah. I kind of thought that even though she clearly knows all the characters very well, she doesn't really capture their voices at all, especially Spock. Like, it doesn't really seem, it doesn't really seem like him talking.

Nate:

Highly illogical.

JM:

I just can't picture. I don't know. Yeah. Like you were saying earlier Gretchen, the desire to sort of like take your favorite fandom things and then smush them together. Like, I think "The Faerie Queene" probably is a very niche fandom, but it still seems like, yeah, like it's kind of like going, okay, these are two things that I really like and I'm going to draw them together. And I don't know. Like I think a lot of the thing that irritated me about the portrayal of everything was just how nondescript the characters feelings were about everything. Like there just wasn't a lot of, I don't know, like stuff just happened and nobody really, like it just seemed like everything was normal and nobody really commented on it or thought anything about it. Like, I don't know, it's so weird though, because you think about Star Trek, the show, and they were experiencing stuff like this all the time.

Nate:

Yeah, right.

JM:

Right? It was. Like, I mean, I could kind of imagine this being an episode almost.

Nate:

Yeah. It does feel like a very original Star Trek.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I was getting the same sort of like, I could see it happening. I could see it happening, especially even though I haven't seen too much of it myself. I know the animated series is a little more outlandish at times. And I could see this happening and that as well.

Nate:

Yeah, I've never seen any animated series. I've heard mixed things, but...

JM:

Yeah.

 Gretchen:

I've heard, you know, it is a little sillier. And I feel like there's a little more of a fantastical element to things in that series.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

This kind of did remind me of some of the episodes where they meet with like the ancient gods and things like that and the original series and some of those more fantastic excursions.

JM:

Oh, for sure. But it just wasn't like, it didn't have an atmosphere.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Like it was just lacking in, it wasn't engaging in, like the concepts were cool. And again, maybe it's one of these things like if it had been longer and if more thought had gone into the atmosphere of it, it would have been pretty cool, but it was just so like, and then it did one of those things that I really hate. I've seen this in a Doctor Who book that I remember from the Eighth Doctor range in the nineties, where they start the story just describing like something happening to some people that usually one person that we've never really like, we don't have any cause to think anything about that person or care about their introduction. And then something like really terrible is happening to them. And it's like just very abrupt and then switching scenes to something else. And you're like, well, who's that person? And it's like counting on our knowledge of, I guess, the Star Trek crew. And it's from Sulu's perspective that he's like, yeah, this is how he starts the story is like watching, you know, like Captain Kirk is saying something and then all of a sudden everybody's gone and Sulu is looking around, where'd they all go? And that's the last we hear of Sulu till the end of the story. Right. Okay. Why would you start it like that? And then then Kirk is just like everybody acts like everything is normal. Spock speaks with contractions. Like everything is just so weirdly done. But you could tell she knows the series very well. And then the focus on Uhura is cool.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely.

JM:

But yeah, it did follow that original series template to the alien was taken to the Enterprise and he had to contact his dad and get his dad to help out. It's like his dad is the more powerful alien who knows about shit. So but at least he didn't like it didn't turn out like "Charlie X" where he was exiled to an eternity of anguish or whatever that kid would ever happen to that kid at the end of that episode. So yeah, I don't know, it definitely it read like something from somebody who knew she knew what she was doing in that sense. She understood the series, but I just, you know, like it's again, I feel kind of like it's wrong to overly criticize stories like this, like it's just something that she wrote for fun, I guess. And yeah, Nate, you were saying she actually did publish, she did publish a professional novel in the Star Trek series at some point, right?

Nate:

Yeah, and she also sold this one, not as a Star Trek story, she basically scrubbed all the Star Trek stuff off of it and sold it as a story called "Ptolemaic Hijack", which appeared in Worlds of Fantasy number four in 1971.

Gretchen:

A common thing that people do now.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, "50 Shades of Grey" is the obvious example of modern times of that happening.

JM:

I guess so, yeah.

Nate:

But yeah, it's happened a bunch. And yeah, she did write a official Star Trek thing later on. It was "The Face on the Barroom Floor" with Eleanor Arnason that appeared in the Star Trek The New Voyages series.

JM:

Ok. Interesting.

Gretchen:

Yeah, also I believe that "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" was also in the New Voyages, which she also published in another issue of Spockanalia. It was based on "Visit to a Weird Planet." And it was like about the actors switching places with the characters on the show.

JM:

Oh.

Gretchen:

Yeah. That actually sounds like a fun idea.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah. It seems like it's a mix of essays and just short fiction that appeared in there.

JM:

Yeah, so Spockanalia had a lot of poetry in it too, eh?

Nate:

Yeah, yeah. Very varied in the content, at least that first issue. I didn't take a look at the later issues.

Gretchen:

I did want to read, because there was also the cast of TOS knew about it and actually wrote some letters for it.

Nate:

Okay.

Gretchen:

And DeForest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy wrote to it in the style of their characters.

Nate:

Nice.

Gretchen:

I did want to read a little bit of DeForest Kelley's and then Leonard Nimoy's responses. So here is part of DeForest Kelley's where he says,

"Regarding your questions of how I feel about space medicine and having a non-human aboard the enterprise, space medicine I can take even though computers have removed a great deal of mental challenge and true personal discovery. My thrill still comes when we touch a planet similar to Earth in the 1960s where a physician's mind and skill are still the prominent factors, not a computer or space medical gadget aboard the enterprise.

As for Spock, what the blazes do I know about Vulcans? I reach for his heart and come up with his liver. His blood is green as well as an indelible stain. I recently brought aboard a young doctor in M'Benga who interned in a Vulcan hospital to get Spock off my back. I can't be bothered with rubbing my nerves raw about a physical jigsaw. I have enough problems without taking on all of Spock's peculiarities, mental or physical. He is capable of undoing every single thing I have learned in all of my years of medical training and I don't intend to let him do it. I have warned Captain Kirk that one more Vulcan aboard our ship, just one more and I will resign from the service."

Then Leonard Nimoy as Spock responds,

"I have read with interest Dr. McCoy's comments on space medicine and particularly his complaints about having to treat a Vulcan. If you can imagine what it would be like to have a toothache treated by a screaming witch doctor, shaking ancient instruments and yelling unintelligible incantations, you have some idea of what a Vulcan experiences when treated by the ship's surgeon."

Nate:

Nice.

JM:

So yeah, that definitely fascination with Vulcans and Vulcan thought process.

Nate:

Yeah. What issue were those from?

Gretchen:

That was from the second issue.

Nate:

Okay. Yeah. So I guess they must have known about it right away.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Cool.

Nate:

Yeah. Kind of interesting how that works out. And issue number one is pretty huge in size compared to all the other fanzies we take a look at. It's like 75 pages or something like that, maybe even longer. The staples that they used, I guess the issue was so thick that they couldn't use regular staples. So they had to use like roofing staples or something like that. And they had to like manually fold them in and doing so like damaged a lot of the covers because they just weren't meant to be used in that fashion. One of the funny anecdotes that are in that YouTube interview.

JM:

This seems like a pretty, but this zine had a little bit of blood put into it.

Nate:

Yeah. It definitely did. Yeah. A lot of content, a lot of artwork and a very high circulation. I mean, 5,000 copies is huge.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

The issue that is online is the third printing.

JM:

Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I don't really have anything else to add about that story. I mean, I, I did struggle with it a little bit, but it was also an interesting read. So, yeah, it's kind of how I think about fanfiction of a certain vintage of general, right?

Like it takes you back to things that like some of these properties have been around for long enough now that it just seems like the concerns are very different. And at the same time, so much now, especially in Star Trek and Doctor Who, which we'll be talking about more at length at some other time in the not too distant future. But, you know, things get answered a lot in the media, I guess, not just the tie ins, but the episodes too.

Like, you know, they try to, there's so many different series of this and that, and they try to fill in so much detail about things that you might, you know, you might have had questions about. And I think that's something that, as well as the crossover things, fanfiction always has this fascination with filling in gaps. And that's, you know, I mean, we don't see it so much in this story from today, but like, in general, it seems like, like, yeah, doing something like filling in stuff about Vulcan, about Spock's background, about that, especially, is something that all the writers wanted to do.

And I think, like, when the professional books started being published, that was the kind of thing that they really went for, especially, not even, even before, I think, just doing kind of stories that could have been TV stories, but maybe a bit longer, right? It's like getting into the background, getting into the truth about Spock and his people, because that's one of the most fascinating things about the show. And you could tell that Berman feels that, right?

Nate:

Yeah, definitely a historically interesting piece. I mean, maybe the first modern piece of fanfiction, it's really hard to put the line on where it starts.

JM:

Yeah, where does that start? We don't know. I'm not willing to speculate.

Nate:

No, it's almost an impossible question to answer.

Gretchen:

Almost as impossible as it is to figure out when science fiction started.

Nate:

Pretty much, yeah.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

Even if you trolled through all the fanzines through the 40s and the 50s, you may be encounter some precursor to this. I mean, who knows?

JM:

Right. I mean, even like, there are some interesting questions that can be asked, like going back to our 1930s guys and Lovecraft and all the things that sprang up around him.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

And I mean, it wasn't just his doing. It was all of them. But they were all like creating these weird metafictional scenarios, like secret books and stuff like that, which the other writers would refer to in the text. So you'd be like, you know, oh, the Vermis Mysteriis, that's like Bloch's mysterious book, the Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred. That's Lovecraft, the Book of Eibon, that's Smith's, you know, and all these other like creating these things, right? And making it like a shared universe that they could all play it.

And to me, it's like, you know, I always had this problem with the Doctor Who stuff in particular, I guess, because that was my first fandom and that was like, I don't know, I'm not really that committed to it now, I guess, like it's over time. It's just been kind of like, yeah, I just like the classic stories that I grew up with, I guess. And, you know, I mean, I remember there's some of the novels that are good and some of the new episodes I like. But it just seems like, yeah, you know, like I always kind of thought, I don't really differentiate between what a fan writes that I like and what a professional writes that I like. Like, where does that line come into play? How do you start thinking like, this is legitimate versus this is not legitimate. Like this is part of the canon, as they say. Word that we're not supposed to talk about, but everybody thinks about. You stand on one side of the other, right? One side of the other of the canon debate. I don't know, it's just like, to me, it's always been this kind of, it's what you like. How can you think about it in any other way? What you don't like is your canon. What you don't like or what you don't know about is not. And it's as simple as that. So, if I want to include Sherlock Holmes stories by somebody else in my Sherlock Holmes canon, yeah, maybe I can do that. But, I mean, it's not like, you know, I have a choice. I don't have to do anything but the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. And that's fine. And I guess people who only want to incorporate the original Star Trek ideas into their personal head canon, as opposed to whatever people come up with nowadays, that's fine too, if they want to. But, I don't know, it's just really interesting to me. What was that acronym you used earlier, Nate? IP?

Nate:

Oh, intellectual property, yeah.

JM:

So, that's what it, I was wondering about that. I was pretty sure it stood for something like that, but I wasn't totally sure.

Nate:

Yeah, sorry, I guess industry jargon.

JM:

And I got a thought that, yeah, that's really interesting, people working in that playground, right? There's so many things you have to consider that you wouldn't otherwise, because you're working with an intellectual property, right?

Nate:

Yeah, definitely an interesting piece. I mean, it's hard to say whether this is the first piece of modern fanfiction, but certainly after this, fanfiction becomes like a real thing that thousands and thousands, if not millions of people, start writing for all kinds of things.

And pretty quickly afterwards, for not just science fiction and fantasy titles, they mentioned like Starsky and Hutch fan fiction too, which I thought was pretty amusing.

 JM:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Man from UNCLE.

Nate:

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, all kinds of stuff.

JM:

Yeah, that crossovers get so out of control. It's really something. It's really something. But you know, people practice, they get to practice their writing, right? So I don't know, that's cool. They get to practice their writing. And sometimes weird things come out of it, like "Twilight" fan fiction turns into "50 Shades of Gray", right? I mean, I guess that's good.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Good for the author.

Nate:

She definitely made a lot of money out of it. That's for sure.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I'm sure some people are enjoying, enjoy that.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah. Is this good for the rest of us? I don't know. I don't know if it's good for the rest of us. Well, yeah, we'll be returning to the subject of tie-in stuff and fandom. Not too long from now, probably sometime early next year.

For now, I think our last few episodes have certainly been, I guess, tied in in a way. Like you can kind of see how everything works together and how everything connects. We've been talking a lot about the magazine fiction in the United States in particular. And I wanted to actually bring up a very specific thing. And that is what we'll be doing in December. And we'll be talking about a very specific issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is something we talked about a considerable length in our last block of episodes when we talked about the various periods in that magazine's history. And we'll be focusing on, essentially, a year after John W. Campbell took over editorship of said magazine and started to change things quite a bit.

So we decided we're going to do a very special episode. And we're going to do an episode focusing very specifically on the July 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. And our plan is that we're going to read through the entire magazine. And we're going to talk about the stories and we're going to talk about the other things in the magazine, which include articles and letters and editorials. And yeah, I think it's going to be a fascinating look also a time capsule as well, but also a fiction section that I think will be quite interesting. So we have the first appearance of a couple of writers here. We have Alfred Van Vogt, or A.E. Van Vogt with his story "Black Destroyer". And Nate, I believe you have read this story before.

Nate:

Yeah, I read maybe half of "Voyage of the Space Beagle". I think this was included in that.

JM:

Yes, it's the first segment of "Voyage of the Space Beagle", essentially.

Nate:

I have read this one. I guess we'll see how I feel when I revisit it. I wasn't too into it the first time, but at the first time I read it, I guess it didn't really understand the concept of a fix up novel and I just wasn't into the pulpy prose.

JM:

Yeah, and I get that. And I think it gets less good as it goes on. But when you see "Black Destroyer" in 1939, July, I think you'll like it. I like it a lot. I think it's a great story.

I'm not familiar with everything from the magazine though, and certainly "City of the Cosmic Rays" by Nat Schachner is not one that I'm familiar with. I've heard his name before, looking forward to checking it out.

One that I certainly do know is "Greater Than Gods" by C.L. Moore. We talked about "Vintage Season" a little bit earlier and we did an episode on that not that long ago. You should listen to that. It's one of our favorite stories that we've done this year, I think.

There's also "Trends" by Isaac Asimov, which is the first appearance of Asimov in Astounding. I believe that he might have had something published in Amazing before this, but it wasn't much. He'd been trying to submit stories to Astounding for quite some time. A lot of time, this one got it. I mean, that's a big deal. Our first Isaac Asimov story,  we're science fiction literature and history podcasts, so we have to do some of the well-known names. Isaac Asimov, an author that I love so much as a kid growing up. It's a very big influence on me personally, even though I'm not sure I would revisit too many of the novels now. Maybe a few of them, but I don't know. I can always recommend his short stories. He's one of the people that probably got me super into reading short stories because he knew how to distill that to a fine art. I personally feel like, even today, I feel like I would say that some of his short stories probably stand out. But this one, "Trends", is a very early example, so we'll see how that goes.

There's also "Lightship, Ho!" by Nelson S. Bond. And don't know that one, but I've read something by him, and I'm not looking forward to that one. Hopefully it's better than what I read. But we shall see.

There's also "The Moth" by Ross Rocklynne. Ross Rocklynne is an author that I have written for, but I don't know. His name has come up a few times too, and I'm also curious if I have.

As with Amelia Reynolds Long and her story, "When the Half Gods Go". Amelia Reynolds Long is somebody who has published in Weird Tales quite a bit, apparently. So we can see another crossover there with Astounding.

And as well as that, there's a bunch of articles. There's stuff by Willie Ley. Leo Vernon seems to be writing about artificial intelligence, so that'll be interesting to read about considering everyone and other stuff we've done in that field. But yeah, we're just going to talk about the whole issue. We're going to talk about it kind of from the now perspective, but also from the perspective of somebody who might have been reading it back then, and what they might have thought about all these stories. Some of the authors are new to me, some of them are not. They're new to rereading the more story. I think that's going to be really cool. And I personally really like the Van Vogt, so that will be defending that probably, vocally.

Nate:

But we'll see how it goes. It'll be a fun episode.

JM:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah, definitely looking forward to reading more of Moore.

Nate:

Yeah, same.

JM:

More of Moore sounds good. Yeah. Yeah. There'll be some interesting things to comment on for sure. We'll see what we want to spend time with with the articles. There's a letter section as well. The Analytical Laboratory and Brass Tacks and I don't know. Campbell seems to have been like marketing the magazine kind of as being controversial and kind of like pushing the boundaries a little bit. So this is the pre Second World War period. And I think that that makes a big difference in a way like this. I mean, it's not quite pre. Obviously it's happening right as this magazine is coming out.

Nate:

But not America anyway.

JM:

Yeah. And this is like this is before Campbell really got pedantic, I think. And it's like it's an exciting time in his editorship. And we're getting introduced to Van Vogt and Asimov for the first time in this issue. Van Vogt's got a thing with the fans too. We didn't really get into the 40s fandom, but in the 40s, we get your thing where Van Vogt wrote his book "Slan" about mutant people and their powers and hidden tentacles. And I guess a phrase that was used among the fandom at that time was fans are slans. And I guess kind of goes along with this idea that the fans are special, right? The fans are we're a special community, a special people. That seems to be something that was developed pretty early on as a feeling of that. I don't know. I mean, I've always kind of been a little wary and suspicious of me in general, I suppose. But it's sweet to see that kind of attempted bonding and camaraderie and stuff like that.

But yeah, I think the evil communist Esperanto practicing people are attempting to take over my hectograph machine. And I'm going to have to fight them off before they publish some scurrilous material under my name. And I think you all are implicated, I'm sorry to say. But I think we know the names of some good lawyers. And we won't be releasing an issue of the legal ramifications of the Chrononauts podcast. But maybe we'll write an article about it in our fanzine. Until then though, I think we're signing off for now. We will see you next month when we will have some other content. We don't quite know what it is yet. But it'll be something interesting, I guarantee. Until then, we have been and always will be Chrononauts. 

Bibliography:

Cowan, Zagria - "Donald A Wollheim/Darrell G Raynor (1914-1990) science fiction writer and editor, trans memoirist - Part 1" https://zagria.blogspot.com/2023/05/donald-wollheimdarrell-g-raynor-1914.html

Davin, Eric Leif - "Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations With the Founders of Science Fiction" (1999)

The Eldritch Dark: The Sanctum of Clark Ashton Smith http://www.eldritchdark.com/

FANAC Fan History - "Early Star Trek Fandom - Ruth Berman and Devra Langsam, Fan History Zoom" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIpNXq6wSo

FANAC - "Chronological List of Fanzines on Fanac.org" https://fanac.org/fanzines/chronological_listing_of_fanzines.html

Fancyclopedia 3 https://fancyclopedia.org/Fancyclopedia_3

Fancyclopedia 3 - "First Convention" https://fancyclopedia.org/First_Convention

Jamison, Anne - "Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World" (2014) https://www.wattpad.com/story/13132615-fic-why-fanfiction-is-taking-over-the-world

Moskowitz, Sam - "Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom" (1954)

Pocket 2000 bookstore https://www.facebook.com/p/Pocket-2000-libreria-100058006428228/

Profondo Rosso store http://www.profondorossostore.com/en/

Speer, Jack - "Up To Now" (1939)

Music:

Wagner, Ferdinand - "Little Jupiter; Polka schnell" (1881) https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1881.10566/ (interlude 2)

Bayes, Nora and Norworth, Jack - "Falling Star" (1909) https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200004367/ (interlude 7)