The second and more obvious influence was a strange little Bronx, New York, man named Charles Hoy Fort, who spent a lifetime assembling 40,000 clippings on seemingly inexplicable events; poltergeists; red rain; rains of frogs, fish, stones; strange lights in the sky; disappearances; levitation; and related bizarre and unusual phenomena. He was not satisfied with documenting such notices, but offered his own interpre-tation, displaying so vast an imaginative resource as to be-come a seemingly bottomless reservoir of science-fiction plots. Many of his clippings and observations were presented in four books, the first of which, The Book of the Damned, was published in 1919 by Boni & Liveright. The most famous of the four was Lo! issued in 1931 by C. Kendall and reprinted in full in astounding stories, April to November, 1934, inclusive. Together with his other two volumes, New Lands (1923) and Wild Talents (1932), these were collected by Henry Holt and issued in 1941 as The Books of Charles Fort. This volume became the bible of The Fortean Society, a group of acolytes organized by novelist Tiffany Thayer who edited a periodical titled doubt, dedicated to continued pres-entation of Fortean-type material. Russell had read Lo! in astounding stories, but it had made no impression at the time. However, when he stumbled across a British edition of Lo! in a secondhand book shop he went quietly mad. His lifelong ambition became the resolve to obtain the three other books. He wrote to American antiquarian dealers and secured all but New Lands. For Wild Talents he paid $27, an amount which represented two weeks' pay for the average Britisher in the 1930's; in terms of today's purchasing power this amounted to paying $270
for a book published in the not-too-distant past.
From Lo! he took the plot nucleus for Sinister Barrier, and from Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men he acknowledged taking the theme of symbiotic relationship—two intelligent life forms interdependent as the humans and Vitons were on earth.
The $600 he received for Sinister Barrier added to $100 of his own enabled him to visit America with his wife in May, 1939. He mortgaged his vacations for the next two years with his employers so that he could make an extended stay of six weeks. He urgently wanted to come because he was convinced that war was imminent and that this might be his last opportunity for some time. In the United States, he spent most of his visit in and around the Greater New York area. He spoke at the May 7, 1939, meeting of the Queens Science Fiction League, where he expressed his disappointment at the lack of support given science-fiction projects both amateur and professional in England. His talk left no question that he was a
"fan" of science fiction as well as a professional author.
Talkative and likeable, he would thread his conversation with four-letter words, the shock value of which appeared to amuse him. If permitted to introduce himself he could prove direct to the point of rudeness! For example:
"You're a Jew, aren't you?"
"Quite evidently you're on the dole."
In America he met Edmond Hamilton. The two had in common, in addition to an interest in science-fiction writing, membership in The Fortean Society. Hamilton gave him his own copy of New Lands, completing Russell's Fort collec-tion, as well as a letter from and a photo of Charles Fort. This remained the high spot of the American visit in Russell's memory.
The Atompacker was sold to and appeared in the undated (1939) second issue of fantasy as Vampire from the Void. The final and third issue of that magazine, before the war-time paper shortage caused it to fold, carried Russell's tale Mightier Yet, apparently influenced by war psychology in its theme of the Nazis using a machine capable of hypnotizing soldiers over a distance of a number of miles. The only other published Russell item during 1939 was an article describing newly reported Fortean phenomena which appeared in the September, 1939, unknown as Over the Border.
Whether wartime responsibilities now limited his time (he took radio courses at Northern Polytechnic, London, and the Marconi College, Chelmsford) is not known, but 1940 saw the appearance of only two items, Spontaneous Frognation (un-known, July, 1940) (non-fiction) and I, Spy in the Autumn, 1940, tales of wonder, superbly handled novelette of a Martian capable of simulating any living form—plant, ani-mal, or human being—who is loose on Earth. The tale evolves into an adroit detective story, reminiscent of Camp-bell's Who Goes There? but distinctive enough not to be considered an imitation. The story ends in an ingenious burst of inspired writing.
One of Russell's author friends in England was Maurice G. Hugi, a writer of modest ability who had sold a few stories to tales of wonder. One of his stories just couldn't make the grade. He showed it to Russell, who liked the plot and offered to rework it. The actual writing is said to have occurred in the fall of 1940
during a bombing raid on Liverpool, with Russell on the floor beneath the bed or the table (versions differ) pounding away on a typewriter.
What emerged was The Mechanical Mice, published under Maurice G. Hugi's name in the January, 1949, astounding science-fiction. The story involves a man who extracts from the future the idea of a machine, which when built, mothers tiny mechanical mice which steal materials necessary for it to reproduce itself. The story is brilliantly told and is considered one of the small masterpieces of science fiction, quite proba-bly the inspiration of Lewis Padgett's Twonkey.
The birth of the most famous character created by Russell came about, he recalls, "when I was seeking a plot and realized I had never attempted a robot yarn." The result was Jay Score, outwardly having the appearance of a giant hu-man, who first appeared in a story appropriately titled Jay Score (astounding science-fiction, May, 1941). The space-ship crew in the story, including a group of many-tentacled Martian chess masters, provided a cast of characters as engaging as any seen since the entourage of the Doc Savage stories. The heroic efforts of Jay Score, together with the special talents of the Martians, save the spaceship from a fiery death in the bosom of the sun in a rather routine adventure. Seat of Oblivion (astounding science-fiction, November, 1941) was a third attempt at the plot of Impulse and I, Spy. A device is used by a criminal to take possession of successive individuals for ulterior motives. He finally is trick-ed into entering the body of a notorious killer minutes before the killer is apprehended by the police.
An attempt at fantasy, With a Blunt Instrument (un-known, December, 1941), involving the use of Australian native magic to kill men for insurance purposes, proved a dud. The same month, the pen name of Webster Craig was used for Homo Saps in astounding science-fiction (De-cember, 1941), in which Martians tip the protagonists to the fact that camels are telepathic and smarter than people. The cast of Jay Score returned in a sequel, Mechanistria (astounding science-fiction, January, 1942), to engage in an exciting adventure on a planet dominated by a civilization of diverse machinery, ruled by a computing machine. The plot was reminiscent of Paradise and Iron by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. (amazing stories quarterly, Summer, 1930), but with an element of humor.
The most influential of the Jay Score stories was Symbioti-ca (astounding science-fiction, October, 1943). Stapledon's concept of interdependent life forms was utilized to show a world where humanoids lived in symbiosis with trees and indirectly with other life forms on their planet. Great imagi-nation was displayed and the vividness of the narration would seem to have been the inspiration of Harry Harrison's novel Death World. Beyond that, the story appears to have been the springboard from which the writers of most of the important science-fiction stories involving symbiosis as the basis of their plots have taken off. Only a single Russell story appeared in each of the next three years. Controller (March, 1944, astounding science-fiction) and Resonance (July, 1945, astounding science-fiction), both inconsequential war stories aimed contemptu-ously at the Japanese. The war in Europe finally ended with Russell dogging General Patton's army in command of a Royal Air Force mobile radio unit.
Until now, almost all of Russell's plots had been carried along on a stream of physical action. In the short novel Metamorphosite, his sole contribution for 1946, which appeared in the December, 1946, astounding scienc
e-fic-tion, he constructed an absorbing plot in which a Galactic empire seeks to annex a world of apparent humanoids, only to learn, in a revelation ingeniously impacted by indirection, that evolution has made this impossible. As a result of this story, Russell's stock rose in the literary marketplace. Twist endings were a Russell specialty. He showed it again when Walter Gillings coaxed the Temple Bar Publishing Co. of London into getting out the first postwar British science-fiction magazine, with Russell's contribution, Relic, in the second (April, 1947) number. The mystery of a meteor-scarred spaceship which lands in England is solved when it released a robot, which after taking its bearing plunges into the ocean "returning to the Lemurians' Fathers' fathers."
Hobbyist (astounding science-fiction, September, 1947) ended on an even more ironic note when a terrestrial and his pet macaw make a naturalist's study of a strange planet, departing unaware that a superior intelligence has duly re-corded both of them during a routine card-indexing of life on that world. Russell's most spectacular success in the forties proved to be the novel Dreadful Sanctuary (astounding science-fic-tion, June-August, 1948), built around the activities of The Normans, a secret society representing themselves as the only completely sane inhabitants of earth (all other races are the lunatics dumped here by other worlds). They are dedicated to sabotaging progress, fomenting wars, and generally creating hob, until such a time as natural evolution improves the breed. They turn out to be the true madmen, as might he surmised, and when they are deposed the way for the first landing on the moon is open. Well written and fast paced, Dreadful Sanctuary betokened the fact that Russell had writ-ten himself back into the front rank of science-fiction writ-ers.
Stories from his typewriter now began to increase in fre-quency, with emphasis on clever endings. A typical example was U Turn, published under the pen name of Duncan H. Munro in the April, 1950, astounding science-fiction, in which those who apply for euthanasia on a "perfect" but dull earth wind up as guinea pigs for matter transmitters, with survivors deposited as pioneers on Callisto. In these stories, Eric Frank Russell was, to some degree, writing for the market. This was not the case with Dear Devil, submitted to John W. Campbell for astounding early in 1950. Campbell returned it, suggesting some changes to strengthen the ending. Instead of obliging, Russell sent the story to Raymond A. Palmer, who had recently started a new science-fiction magazine in Chicago, other worlds science stories. As the cover story for the May, 1950, issue of that magazine, Dear Devil was most enthusiastically received and was nominated for the unofficial distinction of best novelette of the year.
"Dear Devil" is a Martian poet and artist who elects to stay behind when an exploring party finds Earth a war-blasted, nearly lifeless world. Hideously blue in color, with gigantic tentacles instead of hands, he overcomes the repug-nance of a group of deserted earth children in an exercise of kindness, and guides them as they grow up to build a new civilization. Related tenderly and compassionately, the story is one of the most effective calls for racial tolerance ever to appear, in or out of science fiction. Even more moving was The Witness in the September, 1951, other worlds science stories. An intelligent reptil-ian creature, which has landed from outer space on a farm, is put on trial as a menace to the human race. The legal twists through which prosecution makes innocent acts appear omi-nous are cleverly presented, as are the methods of the de-fense attorney, who shows the alien to be a telepathically en-dowed immature female of her species, fleeing from injustice and seeking asylum. The final passages contain great beauty of thought superbly handled.
The same theme of tolerance pervades Fast Falls the Eventide (astounding science-fiction, May 1952). In the distant future Earth has become a training school from which humans are sent by quota to live among diverse races of the galaxy, teaching by their very presence universal brother-hood, regardless of form. It has been suggested that this story, like Dear Devil and The Witness, is not actually a parable of racial tolerance at all, but merely an expression of Russell's encompassing love of most birds, animals, and even insects. Russell has admitted to having "friends" in his garden and to prolonged "discussions" with them. He has also let slip that he is frequently an object of suspicion at zoos. In the future of Fast Falls the Eventide, even the insects have advanced in intelligence and listen intently if not comprehend-ingly to human talk directed at them. We read:
The children of this world were bugs.
And birds
And bipeds
Moth, magpies and man, all were related.
When Russell writes, "Thus it was in no way odd that Melisande should talk to a small beetle," he is writing of himself.
The concept that other forms of life are not inferior merely because they are different remains constant through-out Russell's writing. It is the central theme of the early story The Prr-r-eet, it appears in Mana and again in The Eighth Wonder. It even extends to a robot, such as Jay Score, and most certainly to his unusual Martian shipmates. It is the none-too-subtle message conveyed by the discovery of the telepathic power of camels in Homo Saps and is distinctly present in The Hobbyist. It is certainly Russell's point in the poignant Postscript (science-fiction plus, October, 1953), in which an old man finds he must adjust to the realization that a creature from a distant star system, with whom he has corresponded all his life and whose letters display an outlook of femininity, is actually a fungoid growth. Russell's total output across the years has not been great, though his most cherished ambition is to become a profes-sional writer. Yet he won a Hugo for the best short science-fiction story of 1955, presented at the 13th World Science Fiction Convention, September 3, 1955, for Allamagoosa (as-tounding science-fiction, May, 1955). And despite the limitations and diffuse spread of his output, Russell's influence has been substantial. For good or bad, the astonishing bulk of science fiction plastered around Fortean phenomena, and verging logically off into strange talents, stems from him. In fact, Russell virtually parodies the genre in his novel The Star Watchers (startling stories, November, 1951), which includes twelve major mutations each enjoying a variation in special powers. In addition, he has acted as a bridge to carry many of the ideas of Olaf Stapledon into the science-fiction magazines.
Most significant of all is the final impression the works give of the man. The display of outward toughness of manner, speech, and philosophy is a facade. A man who feels not only a reverence for but a communion with life, who transmits those feelings and with them his protests against prejudice in terms of poetry and parable—such a man is not a rational-ist.
The point is underscored in I Am Nothing, where the dictator who has started a war for conquest and power reads the childish scrawl of an orphaned "enemy" girl: "I am nothing and nobody. My house went bang. My cat was stuck to a wall. I wanted to pull it off. They wouldn't let me. They threw it away." The dictator loses his appetite for the war and negotiates a peace. This is not an appeal from intellect to intellect. This is an appeal from emotion to emotion.
9 L. SPRAGUE de CAMP
There have only been two humorists capable of effectively using satire who achieved their development in the science-fiction magazines. The first was Stanton A. Coblentz, intro-duced by amazing stories quarterly with his novel of Atlantis, The Sunken World (Summer, 1928), and the other was L. Sprague de Camp, who made his bow with The Iso-linguals in astounding stories for September, 1937. Coblentz, a poet and literary critic, did his best work from 1928 through 1935, particularly in the novel. Though at times he was crude and obvious, After 12,000 Years, The Blue Barbarians, The Man from Tomorrow, and In Caverns Below have moments not only of hilarious satire but of real prophecy. De Camp's blend of humor and criticism was akin to Mark Twain's. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court served as the model for de Camp's most successful novel, Lest Darkness Fall (unknown, December, 1939). While de Camp acknowledged the shortcomings of our present civilization, he used satire to show that it was still better than any previous and possibly even better than most to come, and buttressed his opinion with i
mpressive scholarship.
In Lest Darkness Fall, a lightning bolt sends archaeologist Martin Padway back to decadent Rome in the sixth century A.D. His attempts first to survive and then to use his scien-tific knowledge to halt the decline of Rome parallel the adventures of Twain's Yankee. De Camp's novel proved the most lighthearted exercise in the manner of Mark Twain since argosy began serialization of William Wallace Cook's Marooned in 1492 in its December, 1904, issue. Others who wrote on this theme, such as Robert W. Chambers in The Demoiselle d'Ys (1895), A. Merritt in Three Lines of Old French (all story, August 9, 1919), and John L. Balderson and J. C. Squire in Berkeley Square (1928), dealt principally with romantic tragedy. Reference to the similarity of Lest Darkness Fall to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court did not bother de Camp (or hurt his popularity), but being labeled a satirist for this and other works elicited an incisive response.
"People sometimes accuse me of writing satire," he began in the introduction to his first short story collection, The Wheels of If, published by Shasta in 1948. "This, if not exactly a vile canard, is at least an inaccurate statement, because in the strict sense satire is ridiculing established conditions, conventions, or institutions by exaggeration or burlesque in the hope of changing them. In other words, it has social significance, which is just the thing I studiously avoid in my stories. These yarns are meant purely to amuse and entertain, and neither to instruct, nor to incite or im-prove."
Despite the fact that the family owned 20,000 acres in the Adirondacks (Herkimer County) which his father, Lyon de Camp, had inherited, Lyon Sprague de Camp was born in an apartment on 93rd Street, in congested New York City, November 27, 1907. The de Camps were not affluent, and the sale of parcels of land for the construction of summer camps as well as the ownership and operation of a sawmill were important sources of income. He was the first of three boys borne by his mother, Beatrice Sprague, daughter of the distinguished Civil War hero, educator, inventor, banker, economist, and linguist, Charles Ezra Sprague, founder of The School of Commerce at New York University, where a plaque has been erected in his memory.
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