Dry Ice Factory

After reading The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, I was left with the impression that Francis Stevens (pen name for Gertrude Barrows Bennett) was a kind of outsider artist who used genre tropes in eccentric ways, perhaps due to her inexperience as a writer, and wasn't always in complete control of her material. Now having read the two novels she is perhaps most famous for, I've revised my impression. Theses are both supremely accomplished pulp novels in which she exhibits full control of the tropes and material. If they are somewhat eccentric, it's in the way that she blends genres, although it's important to bear in mind that she was writing at a time (her stories were published between 1917 and 1923) when the pulp magazines were only on the verge of specializing into specific genres of the fantastic such as horror and science fiction. But in terms of the skills of the writer, these novels seem superior to me than anything written by Homer Eon Flint, for example. Her imagination is similarly outrageous, too, although it runs more toward the occult and the weird than Flint's did.

Citadel of Fear was serialized in The Argosy magazine in September and October 1917. (I read the 1984 paperback from Caroll & Graf.) It's a remarkable novel that starts out as a lost world story set in Mexico. Two American gold miners -- one a big bull of an Irishman, who is the protagonist, and the other a clever sneak, who is the antagonist -- are lost in the Mexican desert when they stumble upon a mysterious hacienda. Soon they are taken to an underground city inhabited by pre-Toltec giants. A conflict amongst this strange race results in our hero being expelled from the hidden city. The action then moves forward fifteen years, when our hero visits his sister in the suburbs of a large city in the Eastern US. Soon the household is under attack from bizarre and mysterious creatures, and the main suspect is a sinister man who lives in a walled compound and claims to be breeding livestock. What he's really up to is much more outlandish than that, of course, and the novel climaxes in a supernatural conflict.

Citadel of Fear is very conventional in many ways, with a manly man as the hero and an early form of the manic pixie dream girl as his love interest. The lost world section of the story is fascinating for the way it creates its exotic pre-Columbian fantasy world, in which ancient Mexican gods vie for power. The action bogs down a bit in the middle part of book, as perhaps too much futile coming-and-going and vague bumpings in the night and comical-skeptical detectives prolong the slow reveal of what then becomes a wonderfully grotesque premise leading to the finale. As others have commented, if the early parts bear the imprint of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, there's more than a little bit of H.G. Wells' Island of Dr Moreau in the latter part of the book, although this is more science fantasy than science fiction when push comes to shove. It's here that Stevens' grotesque imagination is set free, and there is a nightmare quality to the climax that still carries quite a charge. It's also fascinating how Stevens retains a conflicted, mixed perspective of skepticism, Christianity, and paganism in the denouement, with a slight emphasis on the latter that seems a hallmark of the fantasy genre.

The Heads of Cerberus was serialized in The Thrill Book magazine in August through October 1919. (I read the 1952 hardback collectors edition from Polaris Press.) The Thrill Book was a short-lived attempt to publish a magazine specializing in the fantastic, and Stevens apparently sold them other stories that were lost when the magazine quickly folded. This novel begins in contemporary Philadelphia when another big bull of an Irish-American finds his friend blacked out from a blow to the head in an upstairs bedroom. Soon we learn about an ancient crystal vial with a Cerberus-headed stopper and supposedly containing dust of magical properties. When the dust is poured out, the two men and the Irishman's sister (where have we seen that before?) are transported first to a weird twilight fantasyland and then to a dystopian Philadelphia of two centuries in the future. Satirical and yet cracking adventures ensue, with a wonderfully unsettled resolution in which the transformative dust disappears with a gentleman of uncertain intentions.

The Heads of Cerberus is touted as possibly the first alternate world story. What's interesting to me about that aspect of the story is that the alternate Philadelphia ends up being specifically a kind of imaginary world even within the story itself. It isn't so much a parallel world as one that is conjured up by the imaginations of the protagonists, and thus it becomes a kind of metaphor for science fiction itself: a work of the imagination. I also found it interesting that the rationalization for how this other world was created/reached was very reminiscent of the rationalization for the parallel world in The Blind Spot by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, which was serialized in Argosy All-Story in 1921. Hall is usually credited for the occult aspects of that hybrid novel, and it must be said that Stevens handles the occult aspects of her novel much more competently than Hall does. Still, both novels have occult and science fictional aspects, and I'm not enough of a scholar of the era to surmise whether it's a matter of influence or of common practice in the pulps in those days.

A lot of claims are made for Stevens' influence on the developing genres of the fantastic. It appears that the admiring quote about Citadel of Fear that's still widely attributed to H.P. Lovecraft was not in fact written by him. It was written by someone named August T. Swift, which was long wrongly thought to be a pseudonym of Lovecraft's. I haven't seen any indication that Lovecraft commented on Stevens at all, although people see signs of influence, and I can see why. As for the claim that A. Merritt admired her work, there is no direct evidence that I've seen. Apparently for many years people thought Stevens was a pseudonym of Merritt's, and this was only debunked in the '50s. Again, you can see the similarities in the works of Stevens and Merrit, but is that a sign of influence? Whatever the case, Stevens remained a name to be conjured with amongst the cognoscenti of the fantasy pulps, and the fact that her work has been reprinted over the years attests to a continuing admiration, even if this has never led to fame.

One of the best articles I've found about her is Andrew Liptak's Kirkus Review piece, "The Influential Pulp Career of Frances Stevens". Here I learned that Gertrude Barrows published her first story in 1904 at the age of 17, thus establishing that she was interested in writing at an early age. (Other pieces I've read indicated that she was more interested in drawing early on.) Another interesting tidbit is that when she picked up the pen again in 1917, the pen name she wanted to use was Jean Veil, but Munsey magazine editor Bob Davis stuck her with Francis Stevens for some reason. Maybe he thought "Veil" was too obvious, but I like its artificiality.

Both of these novels are available in etexts, but I've read that a lot of the e-versions of Citadel of Fear don't include the whole novel, so be sure to dig a bit before you download one. Last time I checked, neither novel was available at the Gutenberg Project, and I think I only found one work by Stevens there. Another sign, perhaps, that she is arill undervalued. Whether she was influential or not, her stories and novels strike me as more than worthy to be included in the roster of forgotten writers mentioned in the jacket copy of Polaris Press: "Some of these old masters of fantasy -- and there are many others -- were A. Merritt, Murray Leinster, Homer Eon Flint, Ray Cummings, Garrett P. Serviss, J.U. Giesy and Francis Stevens." For me she joins Serviss and Flint as previously unknown writers of early science fiction who are worth exploring in depth.

[NOTE: The scans of the magazine covers were taken from isfdb.org.]

I've now read all four of Garret P. Serviss' readily available science fiction novels. Serviss is so far the best early science fiction writer in America that I've read. He was born in 1851 and became an astronomy journalist for the New York Sun in 1876, and he didn't write his first SF novel until 1898, when he was nearly 50. The Moon Metal was his second novel, published in 1900. E.F. Bleiler considered it Serviss' best story, partly, I think, because he looked down on the "pulp excess" of Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) and A Columbus of Space (1911), both of which I enjoyed more than The Moon Metal.

That said, I really enjoyed The Moon Metal too (and also the fourth Serviss novel I've read, The Second Deluge). Serviss was explicit about his indebtedness to Jules Verne, and The Moon Metal shows the debt. It's set roughly 40 years in the future, so sometime in the 1930s or 1940s. One tossed off bit of futurology comes when the protagonist takes a commercial airplane to San Francisco late in the book. Not a bad prediction considering that the Wright Brothers' first powered flight happened three years after this book was published. This kind of "prediction" was a specialty of Verne as well, since he was privy to the latest engineering ideas that were under development.

The plot of The Moon Metal concerns a financial crisis caused by the discovery of an enormous amount of gold in Antarctica, which undermines the gold standard. A mysterious figure named Dr. Syx appears with the offer of a new metal called artemisium that he says can be used as the new monetary standard. While he allows people to visit the mine in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where he claims to produce the metal, he refuses to share the secret of the refining process. The intrigue of the novel circles around this mystery, with the narrator pulled into an investigation into the matter by another scientist.

The title of the book more or less gives away the secret, but the investigation and some of the incidentals provide plenty of fun along the way. For example, there's a mountain-climbing scene that features an experimental balloon-assisted grappling hook, and there's a scary device that kills people by coating them with artemisium. In one remarkable scene that's unfortunately left stranded, Syx plays a film documentary (again, predicting longer form films than existed in 1900) that seems to show a humanoid culture that was wiped out in some kind of cataclysm on what is unexpectedly revealed to be the moon. It's never mentioned again in the rest of the book.

Serviss had plenty of striking ideas, but, as in that last example, he wasn't always good at incorporating them into the story. There's a lot of interesting scientific and pseudo-scientific speculation in The Moon Metal, and I suppose that's the thing that seems remarkable about Serviss from the modern vantage. He was writing at a time when science fiction wasn't even a term yet, let alone a fully formed genre. The American branch of this strange new form of literature was about to be dominated by purveyors of exotic lost world adventure, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt. Serviss was writing more about scientific ideas than the new wave to come, and in that way he looks forward to Gernsback and Campbell. Gernsback was certainly a fan and reprinted three of Serviss' four novels in Amazing as an example of the type of story he was looking for (although, to be fair, he also reprinted Burroughs and Merritt). As the article about him in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says, 'In a sense, Serviss, who was almost fifty before he began writing fiction, was born too soon; born twenty years later he might have become one of the prolific masters of the new sf.'

I've received the latest catalog (#38) from Bob Brown and Associates -- a local book dealer. (So local that his shop is three blocks from here.) It's four sheets of paper folded into a chapbook, with the cover beige and the interior white. I always enjoy looking through Bob's catalogs both because he usually features old science fiction novels that I've never heard of and I guess because I just like looking at random lists of books.

Here's one I'd never heard of:

Bigley, Cantell. AURIFODINA OR ADVENTURES IN THE GOLD REGION. Baker & Scribner, NY, 1849. 1st ed. One of the earliest American Lost Race novels. [Description of book's condition deleted.] A scarce and important early American fantasy occasionally credited with helping to start the California Gold Rush.

I mean, who knew? I definitely didn't know that lost race novels started that early, but I suppose it just shows I don't know much about lost race novels.

Or this one sounds like a corker:

Olerich, Henry. A CITYLESS AND COUNTRYLESS WORLD, AN OUTLINE OF PRACTICAL CO-OPERATIVE INDIVIDUALISM. Gilmore & Olerich, Holstein, 1893. 1st ed.

"Gilmore & Olerich", eh? Self-published, then.

But then there's this:

Wentworth-James, G De S. THE TELEVISION GIRL. A NOVEL. Hurst & Blackett, London, 1928. 6th Thousand. [Description of book's condition deleted.] ... a very scarce SF novel about the fictionalized development of television.

Torn from yesterday's headlines, no doubt. The title reminds me of Amy Thomson's VIRTUAL GIRL.

In other news, Bob is offering a signed first edition of Stephanie Meyer's TWILIGHT for $1150.00. Copyright 2005. Most expensive single volume in the catalog. Can its value possibly appreciate over time? The mind boggles.

'Lest you think me a biassed witness, another’s pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Prof. Garrett P. Serviss ... '

--H.P. Lovecraft, "Beyond the Walls of Sleep" (1919)

FLINT, HOMER EON (born FLINDT, 1892-1924)
American (California) writer for the pulp magazines. His death remains a mystery; perhaps executed by gangsters. In many ways the outstanding writer of s-f in the Munsey pulp magazines.

-- Everett F. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years

I'm not sure why I finished this trilogy, which was first serialized by Bob Davis in the Munsey magazines in 1912, 1913, and 1914 and then collected into an omnibus book in 1914. It was a slog to read, and it took me well over a year to get through it, with long breaks between each book of the trilogy. Why a slog? It is priggish, mawkish, racist, and pretty much completely unbelievable. It has all the worst aspects of Edgar Rice Burroughs (a contemporary of England's) with almost none of the virtues of his imagination. Yet I did not bounce off it, as I did with Bellamy's Looking Backward, so I guess it wasn't boring. There was just enough interest in seeing how the story ended to keep me going.

( Into the great abysss )

Francis Stevens was the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett -- a figure of some mystery who wrote for the pulps from 1917 to 1923 while caring for her sick mother and then, after her mother died, stopped writing and more or less disappeared from the face of the earth, even losing contact with her own daughter. Her weird fiction, largely published in the Munsey magazines (she was another discovery of Bob Davis'), was an influence on both A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft. She wrote a number of novels that have been reprinted now and again over the years, and in 2004 University of Nebraska Press under its Bison Books imprint published a collection of shorter works called The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy.

So far I've only read "The Nightmare", which is an odd story. It's a lost world story, in some ways reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land that Time Forgot (1918). A young American gentleman of leisure boards the Lusitania in New York en route to London, and wakes up in the middle of the ocean. He washes up on an island and soon finds out that he is somehow in the Pacific, not the Atlantic. He is soon embroiled in a contest between twin Russian brothers who have come to the island to seek an element in the interior that can change lead to gold. A shifty American guide (for whom the narrator is initially mistaken) is the only one who knows how to find his way through the volcanic cliffs into the interior. The lost world inside the volcano turns out to be full of bizarre creatures such as man-eating cabbages and giant bats.

This is basically an adventure story, but it manages to approach its material in an unusual way. For example, the protagonist is a bit of a bumbling twit, by no means a Burroughsian hero. He does perform some heroic actions despite himsef and through sheer luck, but for the most part he is tossed back and forth between the two rival gangs without much control over his own fate. Also interesting is how his sense of who his allies are shifts almost every time he moves from one group to the other. The story has a certain dream logic in that way, with the narrative shifting its valence as his context changes. There's a fairly large cast of characters for a novelette, and they are all distinct. The two Russian brothers are very charismatic and have a fascinating relationship -- a very powerful bond despite their violently conflicting aims (one a loyal tsarist, the other a nihilist). There's a young woman whose affections are torn between the two, yet whose character does not seem at all subsumed in them. She has her own mysterious reasons and goals.

What's most bizarre about this story is that it builds up a full head of steam, plunging us into the nightmare world of the mysterious island and the hugger-mugger and derring-do and scheming of the two gangs as they try to get the upper hand on each other, and then right at the climax of the action, the protagonist is plunged into the sea again and ... everything turns out to be a dream. WTF?!!!! She didn't really just do that, did she? Complete deflation of what had been an excellent adventure, in the most banal way possible. You have *got* to be kidding me! And then ... and *then* ... another switch is flipped, and it turns out it really *wasn't* a dream, except that everything we saw earlier has now either been disposed of or wasn't what it seemed at the time. So still sort of not real, but with future adventures in a similar vein apparently possible and imminent.

I'm not sure what happened. It almost seems as though Stevens got to a point where she couldn't resolve the story as she had set it up, so she just switched gears and gave up on it. On the other hand, apparently the shtick at All-Story at the time (1917) was stories that appeared to be supernatural or weird but ended up having a rational or common sense explanation, so it's possible that this was the normal structure for such stories. It seems completely self-defeating, in a way, although the way Stevens shifts gears twice at the end is very unusual, so maybe she was playing with the formula she had been handed.

So the verdict is out on whether she wasn't in control of her material or was actually playing an interesting game with it. We'll see if the other stories shed any light on the question. What's clearer is that she had a very good grasp of character and weird adventure. I found "The Nightmare" completely vivid and engrossing up to the point at which the rug was pulled out from under the narrative. A real page turner.

Yesterday I splurged on a couple of old collectible books, which is something I haven't done in years. Pictured above is a first edition of Garrett P. Serviss' A Columbus of Space. The book was published by D. Appleton and Company in 1911, although the novel was first serialized by Bob Davis in All Story in 1909. Serviss is little remembered today, but he is a fascinating transitional figure in American science fiction. This story of a scientific expedition to Venus on an atomic powered spaceship is full of smart world-building and reads like an imaginary midway point between Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose "Under the Moons of Mars" was serialized in All Story in 1912. The climax foreshadows Asimov's "Nightfall". (This is one of the books that Gernsback reserialized in Amazing as an example of the kind of scientifiction story he was interested in publishing.) I love the cover of this edition, and there are four interior illustrations on color plates that are also wonderful. This may well be the oldest book in my collection now, almost exactly a hundred years old.

I also picked up a first edition of Murray Leinster's Operation: Outer Space, which was published by Fantasy Press in 1954.

I don't know what got into me. A sudden overwhelming rush of book lust. (Well, I had actually been faunching after the Serviss since I spotted it in Bob Brown's latest catalog last weekend, but I couldn't make it to the shop until yesterday.)

No genre stands alone, and in dealing with romance I have to allude to every other aspect of literature as well. Still, the conventions of prose romance show little change over the course of centuries, and conservatism of this kind is the mark of a stable genre. In the Greek romances we find stories of mysterious birth, oracular prophecies about the future contortions of the plot, foster parents, adventures which involve capture by pirates, narrow escapes from death, recognition of the true identity of the hero and his eventual marriage with the heroine. We open, let us say, Guy Mannering, written fifteen centuries later, and we find that, although there are slight changes in the setting, the kind of story being told, a story of mysterious birth, oracular prophecies, capture by pirates, and the like, is very much the same. In Greek romance the characters are Levantine, the setting is the Mediterranean world, and the normal means of transportation is by shipwreck. In science fiction the characters may be earthlings, the setting the intergalactic spaces, and what gets wrecked in hostile territory a spaceship, but the tactics of the storyteller generally conform to much the same outlines.

-- Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976)

And right here let me remark that science-faking requires a great deal of research. One has to 'bone' an immense mass of data, in order to give the requisite air of verisimilitude.

--George Allan England, "The Fantastic in Fiction" (a fascinating article by this all-purpose pulp writer that I want to write about at greater length when I have the time)