Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Fortune turned up the heat in The Sea Priestess (Samuel Weiser, 1938) and its sequel Moon Magic (Weiser, 1957). Both are literary tornadoes of feminism, paganism, natural magic, and sex…with Atlantis thrown in for good measure. Fortune also published romantic thrillers, under the name V. M. Steele. (Perhaps she felt that romance fiction was separate from her work as a mystic and didn’t want to use her own name on their covers.) In addition to her considerable fiction output, she penned nonfiction books that explained her brand of occult magic. Some scholars assert that, more than developing her personal philosophies in these texts, she defined a kind of feminist-friendly magic that laid the foundation for modern Wicca.

  Fortune’s deep belief in magic and the occult continued throughout her life and was demonstrated most clearly in what she called “The Magical Battle of Britain.” During World War II, Fortune marshaled her occultist colleagues and like-minded magicians to create protections for Britain against German invasion, via group visualizations of spiritual guards positioned along the country’s coast. This practice may seem silly now, but let’s remember: the Germans never set foot on British soil.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Weiser Books published an edition of The Secrets of Doctor Taverner in 2011, which includes a foreword about Fortune and her occult detective, by fantasy author Diana L. Paxson.

  Also try: Demon Lover, which Weiser Books reprinted in 2010, is a good introduction to Fortune’s occult fiction outside of the Taverner stories. If you’re interested in learning the signs of psychic or paranormal attack and how to combat them, check out Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense: The Classic Instruction Manual for Protecting Yourself against Paranormal Attack (Weiser Books, 2011).

  Related work: Fans of Dr. Taverner might also like the comics series The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage (2014) by Jen Van Meter (available in collections from Valiant Entertainment). Doctor Mirage, a.k.a. Shan Fong, can talk to the dead and uses her power to solve murders, assuage others’ grief, and earn a little money. She’s grieving the loss of her husband, Hwen, but no matter how hard she tries, she can’t communicate with him. That is, until she becomes involved with a famous occultist who has gotten in over his head.

  From the 1920s until the 1950s, fans of horror, science fiction, and fantasy got their fixes through pulp magazines, so named for the wood-pulp paper they were printed on. The pulps, along with dime-store paperbacks also made from cheap paper, got fiction into the hands of a wider audience because they were so affordable.

  But the transitory nature of that low-cost material meant that unknown numbers of those stories were lost forever as the paper they were printed on decomposed to nothing. Pulp magazines often changed publishers, and during those transitions there was often no focus on preserving old inventory. Some pulps survive today in the hands of collectors, in university library archives, and in the Library of Congress, but despite sporadic collection and recovery work, entire careers of now-forgotten writers have been lost. Stories that have been anthologized tend to belong to the more popular—and often male—authors of the day, such as H. P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, and Clark Ashton Smith.

  All of which helps explain the accepted wisdom that few women wrote speculative fiction in the early 1900s and that, instead, the lineage starts in the 1960s and 1970s with writers like Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ. In fact, many pioneering women were writing during the pulps’ heyday, and their work appeared in major speculative fiction magazines such as Weird Tales (the horror pulp most closely associated with Lovecraft), Galaxy, Amazing Stories, Startling Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories.

  Historians and literary critics have mined collections of old material for references, such as readers’ letters, to these early women writers. In his book Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965 (Lexington Books, 2005), the historian Eric Leif Davin catalogued women writers working in the pulps. His research produced a list of 203 women who wrote for science-fiction magazines from 1926 to 1960, as well as 127 women whose writing was published in Weird Tales from 1923 to 1954.

  The award-winning science-fiction writer Connie Willis pointed to the presence of women in early pulps in her article “The Women Sci Fi Doesn’t See,” published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in October 1992. Willis asserts that she would not have become a successful science-fiction writer had she not read women writing science fiction in the early pulp magazines as a child. She points to C. L. Moore, Margaret St. Clair, Zenna Henderson, Shirley Jackson, Judith Merril, Mildred Clingerman, and Kit Reed as influences, all of whom predate the authors of the 1960s and 1970s.

  Unfortunately, as readily available copies of pulp magazines disappeared from public attention, so, too, did these early women writing speculative and horror fiction. Also working against their legacy was the fact that reading tastes change with generations; literary critics and teachers tend to regard experimental literary fiction more highly than popular fiction, which disadvantages genre writers in the long game of reprints and academic study. With more women writing speculative fiction during the second-wave feminist movement, their foremothers faded into the past.

  The women in question didn’t just write for the pulps; they were in high demand. Two of the most popular writers in Weird Tales, based on readers’ votes and mail, were women: Greye La Spina and Everil Worrell (see this page). Mary Elizabeth Counselman (see this page) was one of the magazine’s most prolific writers, publishing thirty stories and six poems from 1933 to 1953. Other fan favorites were Eli Colter and G. G. Pendarves.

  Women were also illustrating. Alternately known as “The Queen of the Pulps” and “The First Lady of Pulp Pinup Art,” Margaret Brundage (a high school classmate of Walt Disney) was the most popular Weird Tales cover illustrator in the 1930s, known for macabre pastels of damsels in distress and strong women, usually depicted at least partially nude. She also had a tendency to include whips, ropes, and chains. All told, she created sixty-six covers for Weird Tales, including all nine of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian cover stories. In 2016, her original art for the 1937 story “The Carnal God” sold for $47,150 at auction.

  In addition to writing and illustrating, women also filled editorial roles at these publications. Dorothy McIlwraith began as an editorial assistant at the literary magazine Short Stories and moved up to lead editor in 1936. When the magazine’s parent company purchased Weird Tales in 1938, McIlwraith became editorial assistant of that publication, and in 1940 she took over as lead editor. McIlwraith brought new names, and new life, to the WT roster: Ray Bradbury, Manly Wade Wellman, Allison V. Harding, Margaret St. Clair, and Fritz Leiber Jr., to name a few. Fans of Wellman’s occult detective John Thunstone have McIlwraith to thank; she worked with Wellman to create the concept.

  Pulp writers such as Margaret St. Clair and C. L. Moore have clearly influenced science fiction, horror, and fantasy writing well into the twenty-first century. Ever played Dungeons and Dragons? Then you know St. Clair’s work. Like your space operas with a debonair Han Solo type? Moore was writing that trope well before Star Wars. Are you a fan of dark fantasy? Gertrude Barrows Bennett is credited as the creator of that genre, and she is called “the mother of dark fantasy” even today.

  Perhaps the weirdest tale is how we’ve managed to forget the women who created such amazing stories.

  Exploring Our Depths

  Margaret St. Clair

  1911–1995

  Tiny elvish people. Underground journeys in the midst of a world recovering from an apocalypse. Magic. All these story elements were the products of the imagination of one remarkable woman who embraced gardening, Wicca, and the Quaker value of charity.

  Fans of Dungeons and Dragons will recognize the science fiction of Margaret St. Clair even if they don’t recognize her name. Gary Gygax, one of the pioneering designers of the game, included her in Appendix N of the Dungeon Masters Guide (TSR, 1979), which is a list
of his inspirations in creating his extensive world. Specifically, Gygax mentioned St. Clair’s novels The Shadow People (Dell, 1969) and Sign of the Labrys (Mineola, 1963). Both involve a journey to, and an exploration of, an underground world that closely mirrors the dungeons of Gygax’s creation. For a long time, this footnote, written more than a decade after St. Clair’s death, was one of the few enduring traces of her extensive catalogue of stories. Fortunately, contemporary editors and authors are working to revive interest in her work, including Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, who included St. Clair’s story “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” in their anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (Tor, 2012).

  The aforementioned is one of St. Clair’s most anthologized stories. Its popularity kept her legacy alive, along with “Horrer Howce” (Galaxy, 1956) and those of her stories adapted for television, such as “The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes” and “Brenda” (both adapted for episodes in season two of Night Gallery in 1971). St. Clair’s narrative about the gnoles is a reimagining of a well-known Lord Dunsany story, “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles,” which originally appeared in The Book of Wonder (William Heinemann, 1912). Dunsany’s gnoles live in the forest and are extremely dangerous, but their appearance is never explicitly described. St. Clair’s version are forest creatures born from the same dark fairy tales as the original Grimm fables, a strange mixture of trolls and fairies, with a dose of gnome thrown in for good measure. She describes them as looking like “artichokes made of India rubber,” with red eyes. They have no ears, and their mouths are full of fangs. In Dunsany’s tale, a skilled thief and his apprentice attempt to steal from the gnoles. (We’ll let you guess how that turned out.) In St. Clair’s version, the protagonist is a rope salesman trying to expand his customer base, but let’s just say the gnoles don’t understand the rules of commerce.

  Born in Kansas in 1911 to a schoolteacher and a lawyer, Margaret Neeley devoured science fiction as a child. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she met the writer Eric St. Clair, whom she later married. Although Margaret was raised in the Quaker faith and supported the American Society of Friends throughout her life, she and Eric became interested in witchcraft and Wicca in the 1950s while in California, where Margaret was researching a novel. The Wiccan belief system quickly became part of the couple’s household and lifestyle. It also became an integral part of Margaret’s writing, particularly in the 1960s, as her novels turned toward more postapocalyptic subjects.

  Enter the Labrys

  The back cover copy on a 1963 edition of St. Clair’s novel Sign of the Labrys is a sign of its times:

  “Women are writing science-fiction! Original! Brilliant!! Dazzling!!! Women are closer to the primitive than men. They are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They possess a buried memory of humankind’s obscure and ancient past which can emerge to uniquely color and flavor a novel.”

  Sexist flap copy notwithstanding (not to mention that excessive use of exclamation points), twenty-first-century readers will find many familiar elements in St. Clair’s postapocalyptic imaginings. Her hero is trying to survive in a world that’s been hit by a deadly pandemic with possible military origins, and in a search for answers, he journeys to an underground world of tunnels occupied by a community who seem to have supernatural psychic powers. It’s as though our current concerns about pandemics and bioweapons have converged with Dungeons and Dragons and witchcraft.

  Rather than her novels, St. Clair’s prolific writing for the pulp magazines of the 1940s and 1950s made her, at the time, a household name in horror and speculative fiction. Her story “Brenda” (Weird Tales, March 1954), a tale of a young woman who torments a swamp monster on an island, was later adapted for Rod Serling’s anthology TV series Night Gallery. But don’t let that fool you into thinking she wrote soft science fiction, or the kind of gentle family-friendly fantasy that defined genre television and movies of the ’50s and ’60s, like Lost in Space and My Favorite Martian. She didn’t constrain herself to one genre, preferring to blend science fiction, fantasy, and even aspects of the occult into a single narrative. And her stories always pack a punch.

  When she was in her seventies, St. Clair wrote:

  “Those who have lived through the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Coventry, Dresden, may be excused for forgetting that love, kindness, compassion, nobility, exist. Yet in man’s animal nature lie not only the roots of his cruelty, viciousness, sadism, but also of his perfectly real goodness and nobility. The potential is always there.”

  Throughout her more than one hundred short stories and nine novels, St. Clair used her speculative fiction to explore human potential, both our depths and our heights.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Margaret St. Clair is one of the more anthologized women from the pulp era. Martin H. Greenberg and Ramsey Campbell have collected her writings in The Best of Margaret St. Clair (Academy Chicago Pub, 1985) and The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales (Dover, 2019), respectively.

  Also try: Even when set in the future or on other worlds, St. Clair’s stories focus on the possibilities and dangers of her contemporary society. She found horror in everyday occurrences, such as a family adopting a bird that turns out to have otherworldly powers in “The Bird” (Weird Tales, November 1951). In “New Ritual” (Mercury Press, 1953), a threat underlies the promise of domestic ease when a wife buys a new freezer that’s not just for preserving food. St. Clair refuses to shy away from human cruelty, as is evident in “The Pillows” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1950), in which humans mine an otherworldly resource without thought of the consequences, and “Brightness Falls from the Air” (Mercury Press, 1951), a devastating tale of violence suffered by native alien populations for the entertainment of human men. In one of her most recognized works, “Horrer Howce” (Galaxy, 1956), she blends the themes of entrepreneurship and alien contact, leaving the reader unsure of which characters deserve sympathy—the Voom, an alien race, or the businessman who is exploiting them. These stories are available in The Best of Margaret St. Clair and online in science-fiction databases such as the Unz Review.

  If you’re interested in her novels, Dover reissued Sign of the Labrys in 2016 as part of their Doomsday Classics Series.

  Related work: Fans of St. Clair’s postapocalyptic books may enjoy Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, released as a boxed set by Anchor in 2014.

  Connie Willis has cited St. Clair (along with a few other writers featured in this book) as an influence. Check out her award-winning story “A Letter from the Clearys” (July 1982), which looks at the possibility of surviving an apocalypse from a child’s point of view. If you like St. Clair’s humor and science-fiction themes, you may enjoy To Say Nothing of the Dog (Bantam Spectra, 1997), one of Willis’s most popular books, which features time travel and showcases the author’s wicked wit. Her Terra Incognita (Del Rey, 2018) and Doomsday Book (Gollancz, 2001) will appeal to St. Clair’s fans for their strong female protagonists and, again, time travel.

  “From the sedan there came a wild burst of shrieking. It was like the flopping, horrified squawks of a chicken at the chopping block.”

  —“Horrer Howce”

  Space Vamp Queen

  Catherine Lucille (C. L.) Moore

  1911–1987

  A space pirate. A cat-eyed woman with squirming (yes, squirming) red hair. These are only small glimpses into C. L. Moore’s short story “Shambleau,” a Lovecraftian tale of cosmic porportions. It establishes Moore’s affinity for global-scale storytelling as well as for the femme fatale. Her treatment of female characters in particular is what sets Moore apart in the world of speculative fiction; she may have written in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft, but unlike him, Moore gave her female characters agency and depicted women who own their power, even when men do their best to rob them of it. “Shambleau” also intr
oduced audiences to Northwest Smith, a hero who frequents many of Moore’s tales. Smith is a space pirate of the best kind: a smuggler, a traveler, a lady’s man, and a cynic with a “heart of gold” that guides his (sometimes illegal) activities and gets him into more trouble than not. Sound familiar? Many critics and fans credit Moore’s invention as the prototype for the much-loved science-fiction scoundrels and rogues: Han Solo of Star Wars fame and Malcolm Reynolds of Joss Whedon’s TV show Firefly.

  C. L. Moore is the pseudonym for the American speculative-fiction writer Catherine Moore. Moore began to identify herself by her initials not to hide her gender but to allow her to keep her day job as a secretary without her employer knowing she was a writer. “Shambleau” was her first published story, appearing in Weird Tales in November 1933, and it immediately established her as a writer to watch.

  Next, Moore wrote more stories for the pulps, both solo and in collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner. The pair used a number of pseudonyms, both separately and together, including Lewis Padgett, Lawrence O’Donnell, and C. H. Liddell, which made it difficult for Moore’s growing fan base to find her work. As Lewis Padgett—Moore preferred gender-neutral names to obviously feminine ones—she wrote some of her most memorable stories, including “The Twonky” (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1942) and “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (Astounding Science Fiction, February 1943) The former is a cautionary tale about a robot disguised as a television set and the couple who unwittingly bring it into their home. It was adapted to film in 1953.