(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: dry electric piano with ambiance)
non-spoiler discussion
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. This episode, we are covering stories in the sword and planet genre. In this segment, we'll be discussing C.L Moore's "Shambleau", but check the previous segment for background on the genre and Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars".
We've discussed C.L. Moore's work a couple of times before on this podcast.
JM:
Yeah, she's definitely becoming a podcast favorite, right?
Gretchen:
Oh yeah, yes. And for good reason.
JM:
Yeah, there's at least one more that I thought might be cool to cover at a later time. So yeah, we'll see about that.
Nate:
Likewise, so we'll have to see if it's the same story. And if not, then you can look forward to more than one C.L. Moore, because I'm sure there's definitely a lot more that we can get to even in the series that this one starts off.
Gretchen:
Yes. The previous stories that we've covered here on the podcast were "Vintage Season" and "Greater Than Gods". The former you can check out if you're interested in learning more about her life. But tonight, we'll be talking about her first published work, Shambleau, which appeared in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales.
And as J.M. had mentioned, we have covered her, those other stories, and we were joking a bit before this episode that I have been the one to sort of lead on all three. But I was like, I'm fine with that because Moore has always been great, never disappoints. And I think this is no exception. She really like comes right out of the gate, just really incredible work.
JM:
Yeah, this is her first published story, right? So yeah, she came out of the gate swinging pretty hard, right?
Gretchen:
Тhere's this story that I actually recalled when discussing Moore for the first episode, where the editor of Weird Tales at the time closed down the office in celebration of this story because it was considered such a great, a great work. And yeah, I think that this story really highlights Moore's capacity for like, we've mentioned this a couple of times, but she's really great at describing different emotional states and states of dreaminess and surrealness. And I think that's really captured here.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely fits very much in with the Weird Tales environment that it was published in.
JM:
Although I will say that I think that not all the readers were fans of the more science fiction stories. I can imagine perhaps some of the more traditional readers groaning a little bit at the space setting and stuff like that, and maybe a couple of pissy letters in the letters column. But they did publish these kind of stories every so often. And even Edmond Hamilton had some space stories in Weird Tales earlier on.
Nate:
So yeah, in fact, in this issue that it was published, it is actually literally the next story that appears directly after "Shambleau", Edmond Hamilton's "The War of the Sexes", which is a tale of 20,000 years in the future.
JM:
Yeah, and even Lovecraft, like Weird Tales was kind of his home, right? But Lovecraft was definitely heading in a little bit more of a science fiction direction towards the end. So I think that he really liked this story as well.
Nate:
No Lovecraft in this issue, but we do get a Clark Ashton Smith story.
Gretchen:
Nice.
Nate:
I don't know, not too far away. "The Holiness of Azédarac". I don't know if you've read that one. I'm not familiar with it.
Gretchen:
No, I'm not familiar with that one. I don't know, J.M., if you've, I know you've read a couple of Clark Ashton Smith stories.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So Clark Ashton Smith has a bunch of science fiction type stories. I think most of those did not end up in Weird Tales, but some definitely did. And there were like some in the Thrilling Wonder Stories and stuff. And he had several stories set on Mars that were a little bit like this Mars, right? That's Moore talks about, I guess.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Moore seems more, that's kind of funny to say, Moore seems more into the, I kind of said it before, and it sounds like maybe I'm dismissing these Northwest Smith stories a bit, but I'm not. They all have to do with like space vampires, basically. Northwest Smith is hanging around on Mars or Venus or something and encountering ancient space vampires, essentially. And more than that though, I mean, yeah, it's the emotional states that Moore describes. It's more than just, you know, blood-sucking creatures from outer space. It's more like almost hallucinogenically, like psychedelic experiences of how these creatures can affect your mind and your soul and stuff like that. These stories are really full of that. And at the same time she was writing these, she was writing the Jirel of Joiry stories, which were also published in Weird Tales. And they were more sort of sorcery. And their hero was a woman living in, I guess it was supposed to be like kind of medieval France and Clark Ashton Smith kind of wrote stories in a similar milieu as well, the Averoigne stories.
Gretchen:
And I believe also that Moore's stories were among the first to have a woman as the lead of these like sword and sorcery works.
JM:
Yeah. This is at the same time that Conan was appearing in the pages of Weird Tales and stuff, right? As well as that, Howard has his own lesser known story called "Sword Woman". And I can't remember what her name is, but I think that he, he and Moore corresponded about that. There's this interesting crossing of all our paths here with the different writers and so on. And we'll be seeing more of that in a little bit, but yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
I think that we had already said, you know, Northwest Smith is the protagonist of this story, someone that Moore returns to in a couple of other stories after this. Yeah. Despite the use of the space vampire, I think that the way that Moore, particularly here in Shambleau, the first story where she introduces the titular being, I think that it's a really interesting use of that trope. I really enjoy the way that she kind of uses myth and retells a myth in a really interesting way here.
Nate:
And I think the character of Northwest Smith himself is kind of an interesting take on it because he's like, I don't know, initially set out to be this, you know, macho typical pulp hero, but he ends up kind of being really vulnerable and ineffectual throughout most of the story, which it's, I don't know, it's pretty interesting contrast to a lot of the other pulp heroes that we get in his magazines.
JM:
And he is kind of macho, but he's always at the point of losing himself, right? Like every story, you know, he's always at the point of like, well, if you just go one step further, you'll go off the edge and you'll never come back, right? Yeah. And this is a great way to introduce that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I did read this interesting article about this story. It kind of tackles like this idea of like, well, some have criticized this story and Моore for falling into the trope of, oh, killing the woman alien, you know, that the woman alien is the danger and like this sexual threat that has to be conquered so that masculinity can prevail sort of thing. But I think that because Northwest Smith, he isn't like this bastion of masculinity. And also he is changed by this experience by the end of it. I think that it's more subversive than that.
Nate:
Yeah, I agree. Definitely.
JM:
Yeah, definitely. She said what Moore said that she, I mean, she obviously revisited a Northwest Smith character, but somehow she identifies more with the Shambleau character, in a way.
Gretchen:
Yes. Yeah. And one of her works, she wrote that Shambleau and the woman from the sword and sorcery works. Jirel.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
She says that they were herself, what she wanted to be.
JM:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, and it's interesting because it's not a Northwest Smith story, but later on, she has a story that we did. Maybe I think it's on our podcast list. It's called "The Bright Illusion". I think that one was in Astounding and that one actually has the male character who's lost and alone in this weird desert place. And he finds like, there's some conflict between two other, basically, otherworldly cosmic extra dimensional beings. And there's one of them, it's like one of those situations where if you were ever to look upon them, you would go completely, you as a human would go completely insane. But it's actually a love story between the male character and the one of those extra dimensional cosmic beings that you can't even look at, right? Because it'll drive him insane. And she's relating to this mysterious alien other that could be very dangerous, but there's also somehow alluring and fascinating, right?
And, you know, I mean, a lot of people want to be like that, right? They want to be alluring and fascinating, but also somehow, maybe dangerous, right? I think "The Bright Illusion" is maybe a more like, there's more dialogue going on between, because there's there's a lot of like telepathic speaking between the two characters and stuff. So it's not quite as opaque as "Shambleau". You don't really know Shambleau's motivation so much or her, you know, maybe she's just doing what she has to do to survive. That seems to be kind of what's suggested, right? But in the other story, you know, it really is like, you know, you get these intense, almost romantic feelings and stuff like that for the alien, right? And it's like something that's traditionally in a horror story. It's like, oh, no, the horror that's going to drive you insane is so horrible, right? But in her story, it's more like the horrible thing that might drive you insane. You might actually grow to have great affection for and even love, right? So it's kind of an interesting, different take.
This is definitely a horror story, though. This one, yeah.
Nate:
It does have some cool elements of the Western, which I always find, despite I mean, the descriptions of Space Opera and the, I guess, what was an ad in Galaxy that you read from last time, highlighting the differences between a Space Western and an actual Western in a pretty humorous way. I don't know, I have to say that I enjoy these selections into the genre. Maybe I would feel differently if I was reading these as they came out in the 40s and 50s and just getting kind of onslaughts of the same thing. But looking back in a historical retrospective, I don't know, it's just, I think it's just a lot of fun reading these kind of stories and this kind of scenario with these roguish type characters wandering around and getting into trouble, basically. I don't know. It's just a lot of fun kind of turn your brain off type moment, even though, I don't know, she is a good writer and really good at this stuff. And I think we all can agree that this is definitely a more enjoyable work than the Burroughs that we covered last time, despite that she was pretty inspired by "Princess of Mars".
JM:
I think so. I mean, I think that perhaps a Brackett more so, but this is, you know, again, it's a kind of a question of the genre divide, like this definitely leans more into the horror. And I think this is kind of the odd one out in terms of the three that we've chosen because I mean, there's a bit of horror in the others as well, I guess, but it's definitely less, I don't know, less like visceral, you know, like this definitely fits in with Weird Tales and that a lot of these stories were pretty, they have the dark and horrific elements and stuff like that. And she's definitely playing up that here.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, it is very interesting blending of genre and this particular story that we see like the horror and Western elements alongside the sci-fi sword and planet sort of feeling that like you were saying, JM, it's not as strong as it is in Burroughs and in the story we'll be covering after this, but it definitely, it's there, but there is a lot more elements at play and like a lot more genre tropes at play.
Nate:
I think that's why it's a perfect fit for Weird Tales because Weird Tales is just like, I don't know, it's before it becomes a set formula where everything, everybody's doing like their micro niche. It's just like a lot of stuff all mixed together.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's very much an amalgamation.
Nate:
Yeah, and that's cool.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
That magazine in particular did seem open to maybe it had its ups and downs, like all the others, right? But it did seem open to a little bit of just like, yeah, we can have all kinds of different stories in here as long as they have this persona of the weird about them. So there's really all kinds of stuff in there and not everybody was going to like everything, but people love the magazine for the feeling it had and then you got everything from Conan to ghost stories to science fiction stories, right? There's quite a variety really when you think about it, considering especially that a lot of the other pulps were so singularly directed. We were talking about Planet Stories, but alongside Planet Stories, there was jungle stories, right? There was like, oh, every story is set in the jungle, right? They all probably have pretty much the same formula and then you had like Air Wonder Stories where every story was about airplanes and like.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, as I said before, there's an Edmond Hamilton in this, there's a Clark Ashton Smith in this and the teasers of the other stories that are written by authors I don't recognize are "Lord of the Fourth Access" by E. Hoffman Price, which is a thrill tale about a malefic conquer from the fourth dimension, as well as "On Top" by Ralph Allen Lang, which is a short story of the Old West and a man who was shot dead yet came out on top. So I mean, even with these two stories, it's much more of a blend on top of it than Air Wonder Stories or even Planet Stories, which is still pretty awesome. And it'll be a lot of fun when we talk about that one. But they definitely found their niche, I think, of what they published.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. And this one too, it's really awesome that it's set in a futuristic Mars setting, but it could almost be like a mythological story or something like that. Like, I don't know, did anybody else think of the Gorgon?
Gretchen:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I feel that's very, very clear. I actually will make an allusion for that in my in my summary.
Nate:
Yeah, the one illustration that this story has leading off is basically her all covered in these like snake like tentacles and stuff from like head to toe. It's not just her head as the Greek Medusa is typically depicted as. But yeah, she's pretty intense and horrific looking from the get go.
JM:
Cool. Yeah, I just it's funny. I just read a Halloween coming up. So back into reading the Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes stories. And I just read a story about the Medusa and how she exists in modern times. And this young young man who prays on women and basically gets money out of them and stuff. She decides to take him on as her pet. He doesn't know that she's the Gorgon. And he can't touch her face or take off her wig that she's wearing. And it's like, you know, of course, eventually finds out the truth that it's a horror story.
Nate:
So yeah, but yeah, certainly a fine entry in a very long line of Medusa inspired tales.
JM:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I don't know.
Nate:
I read the version in the magazine, and they identify it with Medusa pretty much right off the bat. I don't know if they chop off that little intro when they republish it in the various anthologies, because this has been republished a whole bunch.
Gretchen:
I read my version and "The Best of Moore". And they did have that in there that like opening bit. I actually was wondering I was going to look that up to see if it was so it is also in the original story. They have like that little blurb at the beginning.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Okay, interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, there's kind of like a teaser sentence. And then it has a...
JM:
Yeah, they always do that in the magazine, right? Yeah.
Nate:
And then yeah, the little intro blurb about, well, Medusa directly mentioned which I'm sure you mentioned what you mentioned there. But yeah, it's always a cool presentation, checking these out in the original magazine. And a lot of these are available on the Luminist archives as well as archive.org. So I mean, if anybody is interested in checking these out in the original form, I can't recommend doing that enough by checking out the amazing magazine scans that are out there.
Gretchen:
And yeah, yeah, very cool.
JM:
And you can look at all the amazing covers of the various magazines of pulp era.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, pretty much every US pulp is out there. And as we found the Spanish and Russian language ones are too, they just need a little bit more digging to find.
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spoiler summary and discussion
"Shambleau! Ha... Shambleau!". These are the words spoken by the mob overheard by Northwest Smith, a well known man in Lakkdarol, an earth colony on Mars. Along with these words, he sees a figure running from this mob, a red woman who runs into Smith and collapses at his feet. Affected by her distress, he decides to defend her from the mob. Facing the group with gun in hand, he lets off a warning shot at the pavement in front of him when they advance towards them and asks if they're crossing that line.
When one member of the mob tells him they want the girl, who they say is Shambleau, he warns they'll have to go through him first and claims she's his. Unexpectedly, the crowd draws back in surprise, then disgust. "It's his," one yells and spits at the pavement before turning from Smith. Once everyone else disperses, he turns to regard the woman who very clearly isn't human. She has feline features, four digits on her hands and feet, and a turban wrapped around her head. When she speaks to Smith, it is with difficulty. She calls herself Shambleau and says she's from long ago, far country.
Smith takes her in, bringing her to his lodging to stay until she's ready to leave and heads back out on the town. He's waiting for a friend, a Venusian named Yarol, to arrive at the colony to conduct some shady business, but goes out for drinks while he waits. When he returns, the woman is there waiting for him. He draws her close and kisses her, but feels revulsion and pushes her away. He sees that a lock of hair has escaped her turban and in the instant appears to squirm against her cheek before she quickly tucks it away.
It's over quickly enough that he believes he imagined it, drunk as he is. He goes to sleep. When he does, he has a dream of waking up in the middle of the night and having something snake-like around his throat, a creature that causes him revulsion in his soul, but gives him physical pleasure that prevents him from fighting, paralyzing him. Eventually, his consciousness slips and he awakes the next morning, unable to remember the details of what he dreamed. Leaving the woman after telling her about where some food in the room is, Smith leaves again on business, stopping by the spaceports and saloons, picking up news as he did.
On his way back to his lodging, he picked up a wider variety of food for the woman, unsure what her diet consists of. She refuses to eat any of it, nor has she eaten anything else in the room, to which Smith exclaims that she must be starving. She denies this, saying she shall feed soon.
Disturbed, Smith asks what she eats. Blood? But she laughs at this. She isn't a vampire, she's Shambleau. Eventually, Smith heads to bed again. He wakes soon after, noticing the woman is awake and sitting up on her pallet. He watches her take off the turban and as lots of hair fall onto her face, he sees them move and crawl. The mass of hair, or worms, grows, falling down her shoulders while Smith sits up and stares, unable to look away. She turns to look at him, moves towards him, and Smith realizes that he's looking at Medusa, a thought that stirs him to movement.
However, she raises her arms to him and he embraces her, realizing his dream the night before was reality.
Three days later, Yarol arrives at Lakkdarol to find the dealings in which he and Smith were involved in chaos. Learning that no one has seen Smith over those past three days, he heads to the place his friend is staying, worried. Smith has always been reliable in the past and the only explanation is something physically preventing him from completing his business. Opening the door to Smith's room, he instantly senses something is wrong. He then sees a lump that, eyes adjusting to the dim light, appears to be a writhing mass of tendrils and instantly shuts the door behind him, getting his gun ready. He calls Smith's name and the mass opens to reveal the human, blank with ecstasy and terror.
He tells Yarol to go away, unmoved by the Venetian urging to get up and come with him. As the woman unveils herself, Yarol instinctively covers his eyes with his arm and refuses to look at her, despite a part of him feeling compelled to do so. He reaches blindly for Smith and manages to pull him away from the being, but feels the tendrils wrap around his ankles and up his legs. He kicks at them, then remembers something he read long ago and using the mirror in the room to look at the woman, shoots her.
Smith gains consciousness with Yarol at his side, who gets him to drink some alcohol. When the memory of the past few days comes to him, he attempts and fails to sit up and asks his friend what happened. Yarol explains that the Shambleau are one of the oldest races, mysterious and mostly unknown. What is known is that they're a species that feeds on the life force of other beings, using hypnotic powers to cause them pleasure as they do, making them addictive even as they are deadly.
Yarol says that Venus has myths about them, and Earth does as well. It was the story of Perseus defeating Medusa that aided Yarol in the defeat of their Gorgon. Yarol then asks Smith to promise him that if he encounters another Shambleau, he'll kill it on the spot. "I'll try", he said, and his voice wavered.
JM:
Yeah, I like that. It's like, he's not sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
These things that think about this story, these, not just this one, but I think most of them is that the Northwest Smith ones that is. I can't remember exactly how many stories there are, maybe six, five or six or something. Some of them are a lot shorter than this one. I think I've read all of them at this point. I'm not 100%, but I think so. They just always have, even though Northwest Smith is a hero, and yeah, they usually kind of follow a hero narrative a little bit, there's always this melancholy about it. There's always this sadness. It's feeling, too, with the setting is that Mars is very old, that it's very dry and desiccated and lonely place, and there's Northwest Smith surviving in this lonely place and Shambleau too. She's surviving in a lonely place and this Yarol character too. He shows up in a couple of the other stories, and he's often pulling Northwest Smith out of trouble, got a little more of that spaceman's common sense, I guess, whereas Northwest Smith got a bit of that without all the brawn and maybe instincts. He's got a bit of that Conan-like feel for the great abject melancholys and stuff, the poetic melancholys, the space vampires that he has to face. They're more than just bloodsuckers.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do also really like that last line, and it is very much a vulnerability, too, that's in that line. He isn't a John Carter.
Nate:
No, and if his friend hadn't burst in there, he would have been pretty much devoured or whatever happens to Shambleau's victim.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it is Yarol who arrives and saves the day rather than Northwest Smith, and yeah, I really, I kind of enjoy that sort of subversion there.
JM:
I think if this story had been the only one with Northwest Smith, I really almost would expect it to end in him getting, I guess, devoured by the Shambleau, and it just ending like that. It's funny when you look at it now, because we're not in 1933 anymore. We're not reading Weird Tales back then. We don't really have to read the stories in the order in which they appear. I could kind of picture somebody saying, well, she said everything she needed to say in the first story in Shambleau. Why did she keep revisiting the character again, right? But again, we're not really in that position. And if I just want to pick up "Black Thirst" or something instead, I can read that one. And yeah, I mean, the themes are sometimes similar, but I think there's enough to justify her keeping him alive to do it again, kind of thing. And Yarol says that you're going to know what to do next time, right? And he's like, oh, maybe I'll try.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I can't promise anything, actually. Yeah, I will say that I do remember a long time ago before I knew much about Moore. I read "Tree of Life", which is another Northwest story. And I don't remember it too well. It was probably over a decade ago.
JM:
Yeah, I reread that one a couple of years ago, or last year, a couple years ago, or something like that. Yeah, that's a good one.
Gretchen:
Yeah. At this time, you did have a lot of people in the pulps that would have these characters and settings that they reused. But I feel like this ending is great. There's something so ambiguous and something really intriguing about it that I kind of wish a little bit that this was the last story, like it was just this one off. But knowing Moore, I'm sure the other stories are also similar in part with this one.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, there's also the practical reason that these were all more or less published within a little bit less than three years of one another, basically through 1934 and 1935, 1936, with this being the earliest one. So I mean, she was selling them regularly to Weird Tales, who was buying them regularly. So it's a good source of income for her to keep a popular character going, especially when it's like her first hit. And people just want more of it.
JM:
It's interesting, too, that Moore also seems to be have basically, I mean, I guess also the time of Lovecraft and Howard and even Smith wasn't really writing much in Weird Tales at that time. Maybe it was that the heyday of Weird Tales had passed, but she seemed to also turn more towards science fiction and different markets, like Astounding, for example. And that's also where "Vintage Season" was published. So she wasn't hitting all the markets at once, like some of them were back then necessarily. Unlike some of the others, she actually was holding it down a full time job while she was writing, right? So she knew that when she would not be able to write with the the production factory style that could keep her going. Otherwise, I'm not sure that was still the case by the time she and Kuttner were working together on stuff all the time or not.
But yeah, this is a really good space horror story. And it's really interesting to see that tradition started pretty early on in tales of space travel, you know, or like, well, we're going to encounter weird creatures that will be a danger to us, and it'll be very mysterious and dark and seems like a natural fit, I guess.
Nate:
No, it definitely does. Yeah. And I think the just unknown nature of the planets until, relatively recently, I mean, it wasn't until, I think quite late that we discovered that there was really no possibility of life like this on Mars or Venus.
JM:
Oh, yeah.
Nate:
So just really, really an open question.
JM:
I'll get into that and Brackett's feelings about that shortly. I don't know if you read her intro or not, but if not, it'll be fun to especially go over those quotes.
Nate:
But yeah, yeah, I mean, just imagining this weird life and strange creatures on these other worlds that are easily accessible to us, it does add an element to the horror of the stories. So yeah, I really like this intersection of horror and science fiction as I'm sure we've discussed many, many times on the podcast, especially when we did more of like Weird Talesy type stuff. I just really, really like this stuff. And C.L. Moore is great at doing it. So I definitely want to read more of these stories. I actually have an anthology of the Northwest Smith stories that I've been meaning to get around. So I'll probably do that at some point.
JM:
Is it the one that also includes the Jirel stories?
Nate:
No, I don't think so.
JM:
"Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams", I think.
Nate:
Yeah, I think it's just the Northwest Smith stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I definitely enjoyed this story. I mean, it's always a pleasure to read Moore from all the stuff I've read by her so far. I've always enjoyed. I think yeah, this story, great first work from her, very different from Burroughs, who I think needed some improvement from his first story. But I think here, she emerges with a lot of the characteristics that I've loved from the other works we've read by her.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, ISFDB says she has a couple earlier works that were in like a student journal, which might be interesting to check out how they differ from her fiction that she sold to magazines. But yeah, certainly this is an amazing debut in the science fiction pulp world. And she wrote quite a bit for a while, but especially in those early days, she was really cranking out a lot of these stories, which is always pretty cool to see and always impressive that she was doing that in the Jirel stories, more or less at the same time.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. It's a cool contrast too, because there's definitely some similarities you could see. Oh, yeah, there's actually even a Jirel/Northwest crossover. I forgot about that. That she actually does that in one story. I think it's brief, but the stories get, the Jirel stories get kind of weird after the first one, like there's definitely some extra dimensional stuff going on and some basically aliens, but like, and then there's romance and it's pretty cool. Definitely one for the sword and sorcery fans, but also something a little extra with her touch there.
Gretchen:
Combining sword and sorcery and sword and planet together, sounds like a fun little genre mix there.
JM:
And there's a lot of hints of that from other writers in the genre who, Atlantis is such a common setting, right? But it's always this like, decadent, futuristic type of Atlantis with technology and stuff like that. And you're putting your ancient type, almost barbarian heroes and stuff like that up against that kind of stuff and seeing how they make out.
Gretchen:
You see that even here in both sword and sorcery and sword and planet, there has to kind of be a sort of future and past colliding, you know?
JM:
I've always loved that.
Nate:
Yeah, it's definitely a lot of fun because a lot of the tropes are more or less the same and very similar. And the costumes are also the same and very similar, which is, I don't know, why I'd like to see a lot more of this stuff on film. And you probably really don't for the reasons that it probably costs more to film than just a regular sword and sorcery movie when you don't have to do, I guess, elaborate future settings. But yeah, there's something out there that are pretty cool.
JM:
I mentioned that one last time, right? Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it would be interesting to see the Northwest Smith stories adapted.
Nate:
Yeah, and you can almost feel like the influence on your roguish characters in Star Wars and things like that, which, you know, like I said last time, I think it's really the best representation almost of this kind of genre in a lot of ways. Yeah, it just draws from so many of these tropes that we see laid out in part in this story, certainly more in the Brackett, but definitely hints of the Burroughs too. And I don't know, it just took a while for this to really make its way outside of a very focused group of science fiction and weird fiction fans and into the mainstream with stuff like Star Wars.
JM:
Yeah, it's really interesting how long it did take, actually, when you think about it. But I guess, again, so much of, I mean, they wanted to portray the spectacle, right? You know, most 50s and 60s science fiction cinema is not really like this. And, you know, before that, they had the, like, the serials, you know, the Flash Gordons.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
And that was maybe a little more in the Star Wars direction, but definitely not as exciting to watch, probably, especially. I mean, especially from a modern perspective.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
But I'm sure a lot of people really got into those at the time, but it's very different. And we're going to talk about that very shortly, actually, because this is kind of a big deal. And it continues with the refrain we sort of started with the Burroughs episode when we were talking about what space opera might be and what the interplanetary hero story might be. And yeah, I think we're going to get a little more into that.
I don't really have anything else to add about this particular story other than, yeah, it's awesome.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, this is great. Read it in one of the many Moore anthologies. Read it in Weird Tales. Yeah, I really like this one.
Gretchen:
Yeah, also agree with that. Yeah. Yeah, I just think this is definitely worth reading.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And some really good stirring prose in both this and the next story, which we didn't really get in the one we talked about last week. And that was a big thing that I was missing, I think. Let's face it, Robert E. Howard can be pretty brash and a little heavy handed sometimes, but he's always exciting with the prose. So that's something that the Burroughs didn't quite capture. And I think some of his antecedents certainly were able to incorporate. But it's really been interesting to follow that line. And yeah, we should continue doing that when we come back in just a moment.
Bibliography:
Luminist "Weird Tales" archive https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/WT.htm
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