Thoughts That Kill first published in Science Fiction in 1939. Copyright 1939 by John Russell Fearn; copyright © 2001 by Philip Harbottle.
Debt Of Honour first published (as A Summons From Mars) in Amazing Stories in 1938. Copyright 1938 by John Russell Fearn; copyright © 2016 by Philip Harbottle.
Introduction and this collection copyright © 2016 by Philip Harbottle
The Best of John Russell Fearn
Volume Two: Outcasts of Eternity and Other Stories
Edited by Philip Harbottle
Introduction
In 1941, as the Second World War entered its third year, full-time writers and journalists in Britain — previously in “reserved occupations” — were no longer exempt from military service.
John Russell Fearn — then the only full-time science fiction writer in Britain — took the medical test. Owing to stomach problems, he was classed as C3 — unfit for active service, but he was instead obliged to undertake “essential war work” — industrial conscription. He applied for and got a job in an aircraft factory. The work was gruelling. In a letter to a friend a few months later, Fearn recalled:
“It damned near killed me; then just as I was wondering what to do, I got a letter from a cinema manager friend of mine asking if I’d like the job of chief projectionist at the local Empire Cinema Theatre. I managed to get released from war work, took the job, and am now installed as the big shot at the Empire having the time of my life surrounded by film, high resistance arcs, power packs, dimmers, shutters, and what have you … I love this work, and as the reels run — once I’ve seen a show through — I’ve ample time for writing; and the hours off are such that I get in 5,000 typed words a day as well.”
Fearn’s close connection with the cinema enabled him to perfect his technique of “popular writing” — a style that was easily understandable, with a deceptive simplicity. The author’s meanings are instantly clear, facilitating a strong visual picture in the reader’s mind. Just as a film director would introduce a change of scene or character with certain camera shots, so Fearn would smoothly develop his narrative, cutting from scene to scene and character to character as if he were a literary camera. His exceptional memory enabled him to recall filmic scenes and characters which, suitably adapted, became an aid to his writing.
Before the war, Fearn had established himself as a leading contributor to the two Ziff-Davis sf magazines edited by Ray Palmer — Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. He continued to write for them during the early years of the war, under his own name and his two established pseudonyms of Thornton Ayre and Polton Cross.
The high watermark of his contributions was reached with “Outcasts of Eternity”, published in the November 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures. The story unfolds swiftly and relentlessly. Cinema buffs will find a pleasing resonance with several films, including in particular the 1936 Karloff and Lugosi classic, The Invisible Ray.
The science fictional idea behind the story was an old one — the consequences of eternal life — but Fearn approached it from a fresh angle. He tells of the fate of the crew of the first manned interplanetary flight to Mars, and the criminal machinations of powerful industrialists whose commercial empires are threatened by a revolutionary new system of space travel. Despite these sf trappings, the story is really a fantasy, which was why editor Ray Palmer ran the story in Fantastic Adventures rather than Amazing Stories. That the details of the story are utterly naïve does not detract one jot from its compulsive readability in unfolding a story of genuine human tragedy. Palmer was appreciative of Fearn’s technique, commending the story to his readers. “Let us know what you think of stories like this. They are Polton Cross’ best work, peculiar to him only, and much like his popular “The Man From Hell” of several years ago.”
Had space permitted, I would have liked to include “The Man From Hell” here also. However, that story has been reprinted in magazine form, whereas “Outcasts of Eternity” has never been reprinted until now, and so gets the nod.
Fearn might well have continued to develop this narrative style (“peculiar to him only”) but events conspired to sever his connection with Palmer’s magazines, and to move his career and technique in an entirely new direction.
In the summer of 1943, Fearn suddenly found himself in dispute with his American agent, whom Fearn accused of appropriating some £300 without his permission. Most of the money had been earned from the Ziff-Davis magazines, to whom Fearn directed an appeal. But “Ziff-Davis just sat on the fence,” Fearn told his friend Walter Gillings. “They’d paid the money they said, so that seemed to be that — so getting nowhere with them, I transferred my affections to Standard Magazines … Leo Margulies has proved a real friend in getting me straightened out.”
Margulies was the Editorial Director of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories. Fearn had sold to them before the war, but had not contributed for some years. Margulies, on hearing of Fearn’s problems, invited him to submit both short stories and novels. A string of sales resulted, and Fearn showed his gratitude by dedicating his first UK hardcover detective novel, Black Maria, M.A. “to Leo Margulies.”
The hiatus had showed Fearn that relying on the American pulp sf magazine market was a risky business, and so he had struck out in a new direction. He decided to upgrade his writing and concentrate on novels for the British market. He succeeded in selling a string of detective novels to leading UK publishers, and he also resold his pre-war sf magazine serials as books. His first published book was coincidentally the first story he had written — The Intelligence Gigantic (1933). Published as a hardcover novel in 1943 by World’s Work, it was historically significant as the first-ever British book to actually be labelled and marketed as “Science Fiction.”
Over the next four years, whilst concentrating mainly on detective novels (and also westerns), Fearn continued to write pulp magazine sf, but only as a sideline, and exclusively for Leo Margulies. This reduction in his sf output meant that the stories were written with greater care than hitherto, and many of his 17 stories appearing in Startling and Thrilling Wonder between 1944 and 1948 were of a high standard.
Four of the best of them — two from each magazine — are reprinted here: “The Devouring Tide”, “Wanderer of Time”, “The Ultimate Analysis”, and “The Unbroken Chain.”
“The Devouring Tide” and “The Ultimate Analysis” saw Fearn revisiting some of his pre-war “thought variant” concepts, particularly his Mathematica stories but this time he explored them in more human terms. Magazine sf had been evolving rapidly since the pre-war days, and the “idea as hero” narratives were giving way to a much more humanised type of story. These stories are fascinating examples of sf in transition between the two trends.
“Wanderer of Time” is widely recognised as perhaps Fearn’s best short story, since it has been frequently anthologised, and reprinted worldwide. It was Fearn’s own selection for the 1949 landmark US anthology, My Best SF Story, edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend. Fearn was in fact the only British author to be selected for this collection of the best short stories as chosen by 25 leading writers.
In his introduction explaining why he had selected the story Fearn wrote:
“I regard this story as my best short insofar that it embraces so many elements, yet all of them fitting smoothly into their appointed place — the kind of discovery which gives an author a decided thrill when he comes to read his finished script …
“Each of the major developments in the story might, I suppose, have made a story in themselves — such as the after-death angle, or the world of the far future termites — but it has been my experience that if a story, and especially one so short, has the ingredients of several other stories within it, then it’s got something!”
“The Unbroken Chain” is similarly remarkable for its adept handling of events that hurdle literally millions of years, all contained in the confines of a 6,000 word short story! Each of these four stories are imaginative e
xtrapolations of the theories of the great scientist Sir James Jeans, whose speculative and philosophical books on cosmogony, most notably The Mysterious Universe (1930) were a constant source of inspiration to Fearn.
In 1946 there was a surprise revival of interest in magazine sf in the UK, and three new magazines were launched — New Worlds, edited by John Carnell, Fantasy, edited by Walter Gillings, and Outlands edited by Leslie J. Johnson. Fearn knew, and had met all three editors personally in pre-war days, and so was happy to respond to their requests for material. He had the distinction of appearing in all three of their first issues. “Black Saturday” was written for, and sold to Gillings’ Fantasy in 1947. But the post-war paper shortages led to its early demise before the story could appear (and the same problems also quickly accounted for the other two magazines.) Fortunately, Gillings succeeded in reviving his magazine with another publisher three years later, and so “Black Saturday” finally appeared (re-titled as “Black-out”) in the Winter 1950 issue of Science Fantasy. I have selected this story as the best of Fearn’s immediate post-war British efforts, and am pleased to have the opportunity to restore the author’s much more evocative original title.
But by the time this story appeared in 1950, Fearn had effectively ceased to write short stories. He was a highly successful novelist, so much so indeed that he was eventually head-hunted by UK publishers Scion Ltd, and signed to a five-year contract to write sf novels for them exclusively.
The fact that this book contains a further three short stories (and stories of exceptional merit into the bargain), published between 1954 and 1960, would therefore appear paradoxical! However, there was a perfectly logical explanation. All three stories had simply been written much earlier.
“Brief Gods” had been written by Fearn in 1947 and submitted only to Margulies. Originally entitled “Earthbound,” its unusual religious theme did not find favour with Margulies. “Alice, Where Art Thou?” had been written even earlier, in 1939, when it has been originally entitled “The Machines Live On.” Why this fine story was not published at the time is something of a mystery, but the most likely explanation is that its theme was such a marked departure from the conventional pulp formula, that Fearn’s regular markets rejected it. Both stories were therefore part of a small cache of unsold mss that Fearn had accumulated over the years.
Fearn had been writing sf novels for Scion under the contractual pen name of “Vargo Statten” and the books had sold millions of copies and been translated world-wide. In the Autumn of 1953, Fearn’s publisher decided to launch a new British sf magazine, to cash in on “Statten’s” popularity. Its first issue was published in January 1954 and initially entitled Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine, but when Fearn was eventually appointed as editor from the seventh issue, he changed the name to British Science Fiction Magazine. Fearn was asked to supply most of the material, as part of his contract, and so he simply took the opportunity to place all of his remaining unsold magazine mss. When this inventory ran out, he cocked a snook at his rapacious publisher by reworking a number of his earlier published stories in the American magazines (under changed titles and by-lines.) The two stories reprinted here are my selections as being by far the best of the group of original Fearn stories appearing in the magazine.
Introduced to Fearn’s fiction for the first time in 1969, the distinguished writer and trenchant critic Charles Platt made a remarkably perceptive assessment. In a personal letter to me he wrote: “I have never read a book by any other sf author that is so unpretentious about including really ordinary people in really ordinary backgrounds, upon whom are superimposed really strange situations and events … I found Fearn entertaining in a very charming, open, relaxed way. There is a very good atmosphere, which comes across in all his writing.”
These two stories, in particular “Brief Gods”, where quite ordinary people find themselves in a quite extraordinary situation, are remarkable examples of the very qualities Platt had so astutely identified. They are at the heart of what science fiction is really all about.
My final selection, “Judgment Bell”, was published in the second of three issues of Weird and Occult Library, an obscure British paperback magazine issued by veteran publisher Gerald G. Swan, in 1960. Swan had been a one-man publishing phenomenon, issuing every conceivable type of publication, from children’s comics, and annuals, through fairy stories, romances, science fiction, supernatural, crime and detective, books and magazines, and even non-fiction. At one time or another, in a long career that had begun in 1939, he had literally published anything and everything. During the difficult war years, his unusual policy of payment immediately on acceptance attracted submissions from just about every British professional writer. Fearn was no exception, and during the 1940s he had written quite a number of short stories for Swan — of all types. However, so vast was Swan’s story inventory, and so swift his chopping and changing of magazines and book series, that very few of his purchased stories were published at the time of their acceptance — and some not at all! Correspondence by Fearn in my possession reveals that “Judgment Bell” had actually been sold in June, 1945.
Weird and Occult Library was part of a group of various types of genre magazines and books issued by Swan in 1960 that were, literally, his “swan song.” He had decided to retire, and took a last opportunity to use up some of his vast inventory of paid-for but unpublished mss before doing so.
“Judgment Bell” is a finely wrought supernatural story that demonstrates Fearn’s fantastic versatility. It is known that Fearn sold Swan further supernatural (and other) stories, some of which never appeared. These mss appear to have been irretrievably lost, which is a matter of great regret. Meanwhile we can at least be thankful that such a minor masterpiece as “Judgment Bell” was preserved. Prior to its inclusion here the story had never been reprinted in English, but it had previously been translated into Italian, where it was twice reprinted, including being anthologised in Storie di fantasmi, edited by Gianni Pilo and Sebastian Fusco, in 1995. This massive (over 1,000 pages) meticulously annotated collection presented a historical survey of the editors’ choice of the best ghost stories of all time. Its featured authors included, amongst many others, Daniel Defoe, Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, M.P. Shiel, Rudyard Kipling, Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, Saki, H.G.Wells — and John Russell Fearn! Let the critics try and explain that one away …
There is a final, chilling irony concerning this story. Fearn never saw it in print. In the very month of its publication, he dropped down dead — in a Church. To appreciate the significance of this, you must read the story. It will surely leave you wondering, as it did me.
Fearn was only 52 when he died, forty years ago almost to the day as this is being written — the victim of a first but fatal heart attack. He was at the height of his creative powers. The old restrictive pulp markets had disappeared, and he was just beginning to explore new mediums of expression in his writing, including the stage and television. We will never know what he might have achieved.
Meanwhile, in his short life he sold more fiction that a dozen ordinary, average long-lived authors might achieve put together. Fearn never made any extravagant claims for his writing: he regarded himself as a professional journeyman, writing whatever was in demand for the markets open to him. That so much of his varied output was science fiction was simply because he loved the medium above all others. Much of his work was ephemeral, and no better than it needed to be to put food on his table, but much of it has survived — and will continue to do so. Despite the constant sustained and disparaging attacks by the literarti, Fearn’s fiction has retained its popularity with successive generations of editors and readers all over the world for eight decades, and few writers can hope for a better memorial than that.
Philip Harbottle,
Wallsend,
September, 2000.
Outcasts of Eternity
Chapter I
The space ship lay motionless in the long valley of sand, banked on both sides by gently sloping ocher walls. Here, eighty feet below the level of the desert surface, lurked vestiges of woefully thin Martian air.
In the control room of the spaceship were three people — Ron Dawlish, the amiable tow-haired, gray-eyed engineer who had designed this vessel and alone possessed the secret of the special fuel which drove it through the void; Nancy Dawlish, his wife — small, slender, blonde-headed, with a bright eager face testifying to the thrill she was getting out of this first manned space expedition from Earth to Mars …
And the third crew member was Clay Reynolds, Ron’s lifelong friend — telecommunications expert, astronomer, Egyptologist — in fact a veritable “Admirable Crichton” of science. Right now he sat huddled over a variety of photographic plates, earnestly studying them from under drawn brows. He didn’t even seem to be aware of Ron and his wife as they stood looking out of the port.
“I just wonder what it does mean?” Nancy mused, for about the twentieth time. “If we could only find out it might give us a big clue to the mystery of Martian civilizations, don’t you think?”
Ron nodded slowly, gazing across the sandy valley floor. The view was the most puzzling of any they had seen on the red planet. On the valley floor sprouted queer, cactus-like vegetation, armed with numberless viciously sharp barbs. This in itself was not so very extraordinary, of course, since air was present in this spot. The extraordinary thing was that the life should be present on this one spot on Mars and yet nowhere else — for in three months of probing, photographing, and securing data, the Dawlish Expedition was quite certain this life was alone in its glory.
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