This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.
Jack Williamson
John Stuart “Jack” Williamson was born in Arizona but spent most of his life, it seems, around Texas, Mexico, and New Mexico. His writing career is prodigious, starting in 1928 and with his last published works in 2000, six years before his death. He won a Hugo and Nebula award in his 90s and is credited with inventing the terms “terraforming”, “psionics” and “genetic engineering” (or at least having the first recorded use of the latter).
Appendix N (1st Ed.) has no specific recommendations, while Appendix E (5th Ed.) recommends The Cosmic Express (1930) and The Pygmy Planet (1932). As with the other W’s – Weinbaum and Wellman, Williamson’s works are mainly short stories published to Astounding Stories, Strange Tales, IF, and other such pulps, and many of these are on Project Gutenberg. As before, I’ll be reading all that I can get my hands on. There are a few longer works classed as novels, of which a few (e.g. The Green Girl, After World’s End) are also available. I’m going to start with the two recommended titles.
The Cosmic Express
Published in 1930, The Cosmic Express is a short story that’s relatively unusual for Williamson in the collection that I read. Eric and Nada Stokes-Harding live in a sterile future where they dream of living a life closer to the nature that they write about. To that end, they bribe the operator of the Cosmic Express, a teleportation service that feels a little like the early telegraph system, to send them to the jungles of Venus. However, once there they realise that they’re hopelessly out of their depth and unequipped for wilderness survival, but luckily are rescued in the nick of time and teleported back to Earth. Their short adventure, however, inspires their writing.
There’s not a lot to go on here – the Stokes-Hardings are enjoyably naive, even if their adventure barely lasts a day. There’s a strange unresolved thread about a missing dog, however, that I thought might have played a role somewhere in the resolution.
The Pygmy Planet
Quite a few of Williamson’s earlier works fall into the category of “A. Merritt rip-offs", and this is broadly one of them. Published in 1932, it centres on another adventure seeker – Larry Manahan, advertising agent. He recalls Agnes Sterling, assistant to the eccentric Doctor Travis Whiting, and some tantalising hints of Whiting’s experiments, hoping that it will lead him to adventure (like the Stokes-Hardings of The Cosmic Express, he’s a bit bored).
Visiting Whiting’s lab, he finds an instrumental array of two beams of light – one red, one purple – with a miniature planet suspended between them and illuminated on one side by a lamp. This is the pygmy planet of the title, established by Whiting as an experiment in evolution – it bears miniature life of its own. The red and purple rays are used to shrink to a size to explore the world (in a miniature plane), and to return to normal size, respectively.
But there’s a problem. The inhabitants of the world have reached a level of technological advancement where they’ve discovered the rays, have used the growing ray to invade Whiting’s lab and abduct him, and Agnes. Manahan has to shrink, visit the world (inhabited by creatures that have suspended their brains in mechanical bodies), and rescue Agnes and Dr Whiting.
There’s a great deal of business involving using the rays, which seems to take up much more space than any adventures actually on the planet.
Other Short Stories
Among the works available on Project Gutenberg, there are a few more short standalone stories. The Mark of the Monster from 1937 starts fairly like a Lovecraft tale, the narrator Claiborne Coe telling of the town Creston with its “squalid ignorance and its rotting antiquity”. Coe is returning home to Creston to marry his sweetheart, but it is slowly revealed that he is a monster, bearing the cursed heritage of ghouls. Except, he isn’t. Like a reverse Scooby-Do plot, it’s all a ruse to make Coe think that he’s a monster and kill himself, releasing his substantial fortune to the adoptive father of his sweetheart. This one, I must say, is pretty good, going hard on the gothic horror atmosphere.
The Masked World is from 1963, where astronauts are exploring a world that has claimed six prior expeditions. Williamson uses the relatively new discoveries in DNA to create a little bit of body horror – there are shades of the creation of the Xenomorphs that the Alien franchise has moved towards. Unusually for much of Williamson’s works, this one felt far too short and it wanted more. The ideas are pretty good, and there’s a definite advancement in his writing style between the 1930s work and this later piece.
Lost Worlds.
Williamson was inspired by A. Merritt, and some of his earlier works really feel like Merritt knock-offs. These include The Alien Intelligence and The Second Shell from 1929, and The Green Girl from 1930. All three feature a hero, a heroine, and a maverick scientist character. In The Alien Intelligence, the action takes place inside a lost valley deep in the Australian desert, the hero Winfield Fowler on the trail of his missing mentor Dr Horace Austen. The alien intelligence in question is a kind of hive mind, the Krimlu, who are propitiated by the humans of the crystal city of Astran. The heroine, in this case, is Melvar, a more independently-minded citizen of Astran. There are some fun moments involving Melvar and Fowler infiltrating a Krimlu flying ship.
In The Second Shell, the “lost world” is in the upper atmosphere of Earth, with invaders using an anti-gravity ray and invading the surface world for Thorium. It’s all very high-action, with the invaders wreaking havoc with anti-gravity beams against the tanks and ships of the humans.
Finally, in The Green Girl, the lost world is a bubble deep beneath the sea, with a strange mineral intelligence seeking to freeze the surface world – the “sky” of its world is sea water held up by some kind of pseudoscience involving radioactivity, and it is hoping to solidify it. As before, there are humans held in thrall by the non-humans, and the Green Girl of the title is Xenora, who has made psychic contact with the hero Mel. Mel is friends with Dr Sam Walden, genius inventor who creates the Omnimobile which can fly, submerge, travel across the land and is conveniently almost indestructible. There's some enjoyable stuff involving flying plant creatures as well.
Science Fiction
Finally, three of the Williamson stories that I read fall broadly into the Science Fiction category. The Prince of Space, from 1931, is closest to the Lost World stories and The Pygmy Planet in tone. It’s kind of a Raypunk version of The Expanse, with the narrative following reporter Bill Windsor as he investigates mysterious goings-on involving the abduction of the scientist Dr Trainor, his daughter Paula, strange blue spheres sighted off Mars, and the space pirate known as The Prince of Space. What follows is some fine pulp adventure with invaders from Mars and a hidden O’Neill space station that brings to mind the Nauvoo from The Expanse, or more pertinently, Babylon 5.
Although the action is quite pulpy, Williamson roots his space movements strongly in physics, something he continues in Salvage in Space (1933). This starts as an enjoyably gritty tale of a belt-miner, Thad Allen, riding his tiny “planet” of agglomerated minerals, alone in space in a suit that serves as a ship, with a kind of outboard rocket motor to power his find.
Allen encounters an apparently derelict ship, and there’s a fantastic sequence where he tries to intercept and grapple it, where Newtonian physics become thrilling. Once on board, the story turns more towards Alien in tone. Williamson brilliantly evokes a sense of isolation and loneliness, the two halves of the story beautifully tense in their own fashion; Allen riding his lonely asteroid made me think of 19th century whaling, men in pursuit of wealth at great personal peril, out in the vastness.
After World’s End is probably my favourite of the works. The space physics that Williamson has honed with the previous two stories are merged with a space opera story of suitably huge scope that blends in bits reminiscent of The Time Machine, Star Wars, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker.
Our protagonist is Barry Horn, space explorer who ends up in suspended animation for a million years, to find himself the legendary hero Barihorn. Through a sense of awareness during his sleep he learns that one of his descendants, Bari Horn, creates a robot intelligence with the ominous name Malgarth. A million years in the future, Malgarth is working with a Galactic Empire to eliminate dissenters led by the outlaw Kel Arran, known as the Falcon.
Horn is salvaged by Arran (there’s a nice sequence where the million years sleep takes its toll on Horn’s derelict spacecraft), and drawn into a desperate fight against the robot overlords as they wipe out Earth, turn on the human Emperor, and begin a galaxy-wide campaign of extermination against the humans. The sheer scope and scale of the story is conveyed without getting lost through familiarity. There are some great twists and turns, and even though the ending is somewhat deus ex machina, it is at least through a device that the heroes have been searching for since the beginning, and also at a great cost to Horn. Of all of Williamson’s works that I read, this, and Salvage in Space, are the only ones where I really wanted to keep reading, where I got sucked into the story.
Conclusions
Williamson, especially in the lost world stories, loves strange purple gases, or things that are mixed green and purple – the non-human creatures in The Alien Intelligence, The Green Girl, Prince of Space, the Pygmy Planet and The Second Shell all tend towards green, purple and red shades, often with tentacles. They’re either tentacled things, or they get carried around in tentacled walking machines. Like his hero Merritt, Williamson likes to use some kind of scientific basis behind everything supernatural, with a particular fondness for radium in the 1930s stories.
He also has a tendency to blow everything up. In After World’s End, this is used to tragic effect, but in most of his other stories the realm of the invaders is destroyed, but so too are a whole range of innocent beings. In The Prince of Space, for example, the tentacled martians prey upon an apelike race which we see have some form of intelligence and empathy. Williamson blows up the entirety of Mars. Tough luck ape-people. In The Green Girl the underground world gets flooded, destroying the enemy but also with no thought about Xenora’s enslaved people or the flying plant creatures. It’s all a very Hollywood ending.
The more space-bound stories are better. I see that Williamson has written several series – The Ceetee series, the Legion of Space series, and so on, and these may well be worth checking out if they rival Space Salvage and After World’s End in scope and quality. His writing definitely gets better – start towards the back half of the Thirties, because the earlier work is quite juvenile in tone.
Inspirations
I really didn’t encounter anything that suggested to me that it had been fed into Dungeons and Dragons. You could probably convert elements of the two suggested works into a fantasy setting – teleportation through some kind of portal to a savage demi-plane (or the past), for example, for The Cosmic Express, and the set-up in The Pygmy Planet could be used in a “puzzle dungeon” style of play – a dungeon room with a mini-campaign within it set on the miniature world.
I do wonder, however, if some of his more science fiction works weren’t an inspiration to a young George Lucas or a young J Michael Straczynski.
Allen encounters an apparently derelict ship, and there’s a fantastic sequence where he tries to intercept and grapple it, where Newtonian physics become thrilling. Once on board, the story turns more towards Alien in tone. Williamson brilliantly evokes a sense of isolation and loneliness, the two halves of the story beautifully tense in their own fashion; Allen riding his lonely asteroid made me think of 19th century whaling, men in pursuit of wealth at great personal peril, out in the vastness.
After World’s End is probably my favourite of the works. The space physics that Williamson has honed with the previous two stories are merged with a space opera story of suitably huge scope that blends in bits reminiscent of The Time Machine, Star Wars, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker.
Our protagonist is Barry Horn, space explorer who ends up in suspended animation for a million years, to find himself the legendary hero Barihorn. Through a sense of awareness during his sleep he learns that one of his descendants, Bari Horn, creates a robot intelligence with the ominous name Malgarth. A million years in the future, Malgarth is working with a Galactic Empire to eliminate dissenters led by the outlaw Kel Arran, known as the Falcon.
Horn is salvaged by Arran (there’s a nice sequence where the million years sleep takes its toll on Horn’s derelict spacecraft), and drawn into a desperate fight against the robot overlords as they wipe out Earth, turn on the human Emperor, and begin a galaxy-wide campaign of extermination against the humans. The sheer scope and scale of the story is conveyed without getting lost through familiarity. There are some great twists and turns, and even though the ending is somewhat deus ex machina, it is at least through a device that the heroes have been searching for since the beginning, and also at a great cost to Horn. Of all of Williamson’s works that I read, this, and Salvage in Space, are the only ones where I really wanted to keep reading, where I got sucked into the story.
Conclusions
Williamson, especially in the lost world stories, loves strange purple gases, or things that are mixed green and purple – the non-human creatures in The Alien Intelligence, The Green Girl, Prince of Space, the Pygmy Planet and The Second Shell all tend towards green, purple and red shades, often with tentacles. They’re either tentacled things, or they get carried around in tentacled walking machines. Like his hero Merritt, Williamson likes to use some kind of scientific basis behind everything supernatural, with a particular fondness for radium in the 1930s stories.
He also has a tendency to blow everything up. In After World’s End, this is used to tragic effect, but in most of his other stories the realm of the invaders is destroyed, but so too are a whole range of innocent beings. In The Prince of Space, for example, the tentacled martians prey upon an apelike race which we see have some form of intelligence and empathy. Williamson blows up the entirety of Mars. Tough luck ape-people. In The Green Girl the underground world gets flooded, destroying the enemy but also with no thought about Xenora’s enslaved people or the flying plant creatures. It’s all a very Hollywood ending.
The more space-bound stories are better. I see that Williamson has written several series – The Ceetee series, the Legion of Space series, and so on, and these may well be worth checking out if they rival Space Salvage and After World’s End in scope and quality. His writing definitely gets better – start towards the back half of the Thirties, because the earlier work is quite juvenile in tone.
Inspirations
I really didn’t encounter anything that suggested to me that it had been fed into Dungeons and Dragons. You could probably convert elements of the two suggested works into a fantasy setting – teleportation through some kind of portal to a savage demi-plane (or the past), for example, for The Cosmic Express, and the set-up in The Pygmy Planet could be used in a “puzzle dungeon” style of play – a dungeon room with a mini-campaign within it set on the miniature world.
I do wonder, however, if some of his more science fiction works weren’t an inspiration to a young George Lucas or a young J Michael Straczynski.
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