Intro to Thunder in the Void

I am probably C. L. Moore’s biggest fan. I love just about everything she’s written. When my sense of wonder needs a shot of adrenaline, I just read a “Northwest Smith” story and I’m fine twenty minutes later.

I have never quite forgiven her for not marrying me, though to be fair she married Henry Kuttner in 1940, two years before I was born. And here I am writing an introduction for a collection by my rival for Catherine’s affections. (It was a long-distance rivalry; I only met her once, in 1972, long after he was dead.) So years ago I figured, well, if she wasn’t willing to wait for me, maybe I ought to find out a little something about this Kuttner guy. And I’ve been studying him and begrudgingly admiring him ever since.

Henry Kuttner was a highly-skilled and incredibly prolific writer. Before the dust had cleared over his career, he’d created, alone or with Catherine, the Baldy stories, the Gallegher stories, Fury, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” and a host of other classics and semi-classics.

But long before he began writing for John Campbell and all the other top markets of his day, he had a priority: he had to eat.

Now, there has always been a field in American fiction where, if you were fast and facile and willing to occasionally hide behind pseudonyms, you could make a living while honing your skills. Back when I was just starting to push nouns up against verbs, that field was known as the “adult” field (it’s been called worse). A lot of science fiction writers, such as Robert Silverberg, Barry Malzberg, and I paid our dues there, as did mystery writers such as Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block.

Now, before there was an adult field, you learned to write and paid your dues in the bottom-end pulps. While Robert A. Heinlein and Raymond Chandler were making a living at the very top of the field, someone had to fill those half-cent a word bottom dwellers. He had to be energetic. He had to know pacing. He had to be wildly prolific. And, since readers were paying for this stuff, he had to be good.

In short, he had to be Henry Kuttner.

And that’s what we have here: a collection of tales published in secondary markets back when being Henry Kuttner was nothing to write home about.

There are a couple of stories up ahead that first introduced me to Kuttner’s early work (as opposed to the more famous stuff he made his reputation with). Move the clock back to November, 1960. I’m an eighteen-year-old kid, a sophomore at the University of Chicago, and I’m in a local bookstore—and when no one’s looking, I pick a copy of Playboy out of the rack and start thumbing through it, hunting for photos of pneumatic naked ladies. And suddenly I am the center of attention, because I am laughing my head off, looking at a bunch of hilarious parody covers of science fiction pulp magazines by Mad and Little Annie Fanny artist Will Elder.

I buy the magazine, and it remains to this day (March 31, 2011, if anyone cares) the only copy of Playboy I have ever kept, indeed one of the very few I have ever bought. The reason I kept it is that Elder’s covers illustrated an even funnier article, titled “Girls for the Slime God,” by William Knoles, which was a nostalgic look back at the days of the salacious science fiction pulps, when every cover showed some variation of a B.E.M. (that’s Bug-Eyed Monster, for the uninitiated) ripping the clothes off a gorgeous Space Girl. It’s difficult to say what the B.E.M. would have done next, since the physiologies didn’t often match up, but young and lustful readers didn’t really think that far ahead.

Now, one of the interesting this about the article was, as Knoles pointed out, that while all the covers promised salacious doings on the insides, only one magazine delivered them, and that was the short-lived Marvel Science Stories. The lead novels in the first two issues were “Avengers of Space” and “The Time Trap,” both by (you guessed it) Henry Kuttner, and both awaiting you in this collection.

Knoles ran a few excerpts to prove his point, especially from “Avengers of Space,” where plucky girl reporter Lorna Rand indulges in this compulsive urge to keep putting her clothes back on, even though they have a half-life of about two pages before being shredded by either “a teratological baroque spawned by no sane world” or by the hero of the piece, Captain Shawn.

A year or two later I stopped by a second-hand shop specializing in pulps of all types, and bought Marvel Science Stories #1 and #2, just to see if Knoles had played fair with his excerpts. (They were a dollar apiece then; you’d be lucky to get the pair for $75.00 today.)

Well, Lorna spent more time naked than clothed, but beyond that “Avengers of Space” was a fast-paced space opera which, without the nudity, could just as easily have appeared in Planet Stories or Super Science Stories or the like, where indeed a number of the stories in this book did appear.

(A coda to this tale. I was married then, and Carol found the stories as delightful as I did. So much so that at the 1979 NasFic—the North American Science Fiction Convention, which is held whenever Worldcon goes overseas—she created an “Avengers of Space” costume for us and two friends, and it won Best in Show at the masquerade, thank you Henry Kuttner.)

(Come to think of it, there’s a second coda. Back in 1997, I edited an anthology containing the two Kuttner novellas, a third story he’d written for the same market as “James Hall,” got the rights to run the Knoles article, got permission to run Isaac Asimov’s funny fictional response to the Playboy article titled “Playboy for the Slime God,” ran a new intro and a new afterword by myself and Barry Malzberg, and titled the book Girls for the Slime God. If you try abebooks.com or bookfinder.com, you might still be able to find a copy.)

I mentioned those two stories first only because they’re the ones I’m most intimately (you should pardon the expression) acquainted with, but they’re far from the only reason for you buying this book or me telling you a little about its author and its contents.

Kuttner got his start in Weird Tales with “The Graveyard Rats” back in 1936. Now, Weird was hardly one of the truly debased pulps—in point of fact it was the primary home to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clarke Ashton Smith, and a couple of new kids on the block, Robert Bloch and (*sigh*) C. L. Moore. But Weird paid late if at all, and little or less, and that was the economic level Kuttner was at in 1937, when he wrote and sold “Raider of the Spaceways.”

Then, in the order of this book at least, came the two Marvel novellas, with the exquisite Lorna and the equally unclad and luscious Barbara of “The Time Trap.” Next we come to “The Lifestone,” and by now Kuttner was grinding them out so fast he had to use pseudonyms just to stop people from thinking that there was so many stories by “Henry Kuttner” that it had to be a house name. This tale sold to Fred Pohl’s Astonishing Stories, and probably paid enough to buy a cup of coffee, circa 2011, but not the cheese Danish that should go with it.

“Monsters of the Atom” was a sideways move, because it went not to a science fiction magazine (with a title like that, yet!) but to Super Detective. An interesting side note is that despite the fact that it is clearly science fiction, it’s missing from most Kuttner bibliographies, which of course tend to center on his science fiction until the final days of his career, when he and Catherine turned to mysteries. Anyway, while he was grinding out these endless pulp stories, he was also honing his craft. (I was going to say “learning” his craft, but he knew his craft from the beginning.) Consider his opening sentence: “The game wasn’t on the level.” Six words, but it sets the scene and drags the reader to the next sentence, which is what pulp writing was all about.

“Red Gem of Mercury,” also under his own name, went to Fred Pohl again, this time at Super Science Stories. Again, check the brief opening line; Henry was getting awfully good at this pulp stuff.

He hit Pohl again (Fred always knew a good thing when he saw one, and his later magazines picked up a bunch of Hugos to prove it), this time with “The Crystal Circe” for Astonishing Stories. By now he’d already written the classic “A Gnome There Was” for the major market, Unknown; next time out he and Catherine would produce “The Twonky,” a semi-classic; and those excursions into quality showed up in his grind-it-out pulp stories as well. By the middle of 1942, he and L. Ron Hubbard were in a class by themselves for the ability to churn out dozens of readable, saleable pages every day.

And in between all the pulp adventures, Kuttner kept turning out stories that have been endlessly reprinted for the 1940s to the present day. Within a year of “War-Gods of the Void” he’d written his first Gallegher story, as well as “Mimsy Were The Borogoves.”

Not that there was anything with “War-Gods,” which appeared in Planet Stories (which would later run most of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, when Ray didn’t put in enough science to hit the majors, difficult as that is to believe at this late date).

The title story of this collection, “Thunder in the Void,” does not appear to be a sequel or continuation of “War-Gods of the Void,” and indeed it appeared in a rival magazine, Pohl’s Astonishing again. This time, instead of a one-sentence grabber to open it, Kuttner chose to look back from a future we had not yet experienced, though he used icons we all know. It was an approach he’d use a few more times, always effectively, over the years.

“We Guard the Black Planet,” which seems to have lost an exclamation point during its many reprintings, appeared in Super Science. When Sam Moskowitz included it in Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction he held it up as an example of fast-paced adventurous science fiction, which it was; and also as an example of what was considered modern science fiction circa 1942, which, a few years after Asimov, Heinlein and Sturgeon had made their debuts, I suspect it was not.

Kuttner was back in Astonishing with “Soldiers of Space,” a nice, fast-paced story told in the first person, which was a lot less common back in the early 1940s than it is now. And perhaps I should point out that many of these stories use approaches, concepts, methodologies that were little used back then, and which, once he was comfortable with them, would show up in the classics and near-classics he created in collaboration with Catherine, especially under their favorite pseudonyms of “Lewis Padgett” and “Lawrence O’Donnell.”

Plagues, androids, “gods,” an ancient city, a depressed hero, a hot lady scientist, blood-sucking vampire plants, even a sexy ghost. “Crypt-City of the Deathless Ones” sounds like a cross between mainstream fiction and Robert E. Howard, or perhaps a low-budget action/adventure/horror movie, but it is none of them: it is pure Henry Kuttner at the peak of his pulp powers. The story sold to Planet, but it could have appeared in Weird, Astonishing, Super Science, Amazing, possibly even Unknown, just about anywhere except Astounding.

He hit Planet Stories again with “The Eyes of Thar,” an understated (for that magazine) space opera set on Mars. Though he still had to feed himself, Kuttner was rapidly moving away from being the pulpster who could put this sure-fire opening with that tried-and-true plot, add this mildly different hero and that somewhat unusual villain, mix them together and spill them out in an always-satisfying story. At the same time he was writing “The Eyes of Thar” he was turning out “The Children’s Hour” and “When the Bough Breaks,” and was preparing to write the oft-dramatized (and occasionally swiped) “What You Need” plus the unsurpassed “Vintage Season.”

And then we come to the last story in the collection, “Carry Me Home,” written under the pseudonym of “C. H. Liddell” a few years after the others in this book, still not bearing the Padgett or O’Donnell names, but clearly the work of a mature team that had served their time in the pulps, learned their lessons, and were writing mainstream fiction in science fiction settings for magazines like Planet simply because the true market for such things, Saturday Evening Post or perhaps Colliers, didn’t even know Henry and Catherine existed.

And by this point, they were simply too good for the pulps, and they moved almost entirely to the digests, where Horace Gold’s Galaxy and Anthony Boucher’s F&SF were busy proving that John Campbell’s Astounding was not the only, or even the best-paying, game in town.

Kuttner died young, in 1958, at the age of 42. In the handful of years he lived after “Carry Me Home” he produced, with Catherine, such stories as “A Cross of Centuries,” “The Ego Machine,” “Home There’s No Returning,” “Two-Handed Engine,” and “Or Else.”

How good was he? Here’s Barry Malzberg’s take on it:

“What Ray Bradbury wanted desperately in the early 1940s was to sell to Campbell, become an Astounding and Unknown mainstay. He didn’t make it. If he had succeeded in his goal, if he had had what he wanted…he would have been Henry Kuttner.”

Clearly there were lesser talents and worse careers to aspire to.

I persist in thinking Moore was the deeper of the two, the more emotional, the more comfortable with a non-sexual eroticism that colored so many of her and their stories. Kuttner was unquestionably the master plotter, a chameleon who could ape Lovecraft with his earliest efforts, Howard with his “Elak of Atlantis” series, Thorne Smith with “The Misguided Halo,” any pulp adventure writer who ever lived…and after he’d served his apprenticeship he could bring forth any style and any approach a particular story required.

I think it’s entirely possible that, had Moore written “Vintage Season” (which is far more hers than his) on her own, it would still have been a powerful story, but might not have been the absolutely brilliant classic it has become. “Private Eye” may have been her concept, but it took his decades of experience at plotting to pull it off. She had a lot to do with Fury, but it was the forcefulness of his plot and prose that moved it into high gear.

She was brilliant from the start. He was not only very good, but he made her better.

Okay, Catherine—you could have done a lot worse. I finally forgive you for not waiting for me.