randy_byers: (powers expdt)
For as long as I have been reading fantasy, Perley Poore Sheehan has been one of the "greats" of the great old days when Bob Davis was creating a new literature of the imagination in the pages of the Munsey magazines. Yet it was as a writer of popular romances that his contemporaries knew -- and forgot -- him.

Why was this? Granted that any of those few writers of fantasy would be remembered because he was one of a small circle, why has Sheehan been persistently ranked with Merritt, Austin Hall, Homer Eon Flint, "Francis Stevens"?


-- P. Schuyler Miller, introduction to the 1953 Polaris Press edition of Sheehan's The Abyss of Wonders (1915), although apparently Miller originally wrote this piece in 1931 (when 1915 would hardly have been the "great old days")
randy_byers: (Default)
Last night I reread Michael Levy's introduction to the Wesleyan edition of A. Merritt's The Moon Pool (1919). Amongst other things, Levy writes at length about the ideas Merritt borrowed from Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists. As I've written elsewhere, it appears that Edgar Rice Burroughs may also have borrowed a few ideas from Theosophy in the world-building of Barsoom. I was reminded again by Levy's essay how closely science fiction has been related to the occult and -- a somewhat different category -- the crackpot all along. In fact, you could say that science fiction has been a great refuge for the crank and the autodidact who has problems with one or another aspect of consensus reality, or who simply has very strong and eccentric ideas about the true nature of the world.

A few aimless observations ... )
randy_byers: (Default)
I remember slipping straight out of this consciousness straight into another -- visions of a young world -- nightmare figures -- steaming jungles -- monsters -- a bestial shaggy woman whom I, also a beast, loved brutally. But enough!

-- A. Merritt, "The Conquest of the Moon Pool" (1919)

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randy_byers

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