Northwest of Earth by C.L. Moore
352 pages, Paperback
First published September 1982 (Gollancz Golden Age Masterworks)
I am super proud of growing up in Indiana. In my age and era, I think of our excellent and underrated punk rock. I think of the Gizmos an early garage punk band that was mostly lost to history because they were playing in small town basements, but they rocked. I have a special place in my heart for Indiana artists. There are some really special Hoosier authors from modern-day Afrofuturist Maurice Broaddus to giants like Kurt Vonnegut.
He was great but you know who I think is cooler? CL Moore. AKA Catherine Moore, AKA Catherine Lucille Moore, AKA Catherine Kuttner. Just like me, she is a Hoosier. Born in Indianapolis in 1911 Catherine Moore published her first works in the student journal the Vagabond at Indiana University journalism school just blocks from the house I grew up in 60 years later. Her first published work in that student journal was a story called Happily Ever After, and it has appeared in journals.
The first story in this collection likely written in 1932 was probably written when she was a student in Bloomington. To give some context that was a year before Hitler became chancellor of Germany. A long time ago.
80 years ago. by the way the Nov.1933 issue cover that her first story appeared in...
She left IU to support her family during the great depression but published many stories in the early pulp magazines, but it was Weird Tales where she became a popular regular alongside HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard who were fans of her work. At one point she received a fan letter from a fellow writer Henry Kuttner addressed “Dear Mister Moore.” Later she would publish many works co-written with Kuttner whom she was married until his death in 1958. She retired from writing in the 60s. In between her impact was hard to calculate.
It should be noted she never used the name CL to hide her gender, she was afraid she would lose her job as a secretary at the Fletcher Trust Company in Indianapolis if they found out she was moonlighting as a writer. She created two characters that were the focus of her Weird Tales stories. Her most famous character Jirel of Joiry was one I wrote about in my Tor.com article about Golden age classics that would make great modern movies. That character was a swordsman think of Conan played by Jessica Chastain in a few years. She remains an important character and in Weird Tales terms, her appearances were welcome returns for fans.
I am not sure which character was more popular at the time, but her other character of note was the space rogue Northwest Smith. He is played by Harrison Ford in my mind because he is part, Indiana Jones and Han Solo. The OG space rogue who encounters monsters and cosmic horror around a very 30s-style pulp solar system that was written before we knew nearly as much about the planets, we share the sun with.
At the time these stories were science fiction but today they read like Fantasy, as Venus and Mars are impossibly filled with like. Smith as a character is similar to the character Eric John Stark written by Moore’s close friend Leigh Brackett. The world both even characters exist in is a delightfully out-of-date vision of our solar system that I imagine existing in a pre-history, alternate past.
This British edition collecting all the Northwest Smith stories opens with the classic Martian vampire story Shambleau which first appeared in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales. It has been collected in probably 50 or so collections or anthologies from this book, the best of CL Moore to many Vampire anthologies. Being her first story it is delightfully raw and pulpy, but it is so much fun. How can you not enjoy a stage set this way…
“It was a motley crowd, Earthmen and Martians and a sprinkling of Venusian swampmen and strange, nameless denizens of unnamed planets- a typical Lakkdarol mob.”
It invokes the cantina scene in Star Wars but this woman wrote this scene four decades earlier. With this one sentence, she sets the stage for a crazy strange solar system and city. This is excellent world-building and for a first story in a series, she sets the table so well. Yes, the details are dated but beautifully so.
As a space rogue in the Starbuck, Han Solo mode it is true that Moore was writing this type of character when FDR was president. I love how Buck Rodgers some of these details feel now.
“Smith's errand in Lakkdarol, like most of his errands, is better not spoken of. Man lives as he must, and Smith's living was a perilous affair outside the law and ruled by ray-gun only.”
But also they had a noir drunk dude feeling at the same time….
“The cool night air had sobered him a little and his head was clear enough – liquor went to Smith’s feet, not his head, or he would never have come this far along his lawless way he had chosen.”
Still, this was Weird Tales and one of the great things about all these stories is no matter how pulpy some of them feel they also have that grand cosmic feel that the magazine was known for. CL Moore could write a paragraph that pushed you to that edge where you peeked into the great cosmos.
“He was staring into a greater dark that held all things..He had known - dimly he had known when he first gazed into those flat animal shallows that behind them lay this - beauty and terror, all horror and delight, in the infinite darkness upon her eyes opened like windows, paned with emerald glass.”
The stories have gorgons, vampires, Werewolves, and ancient tombs. The best moments in the book come when the pulp style mixes with that cosmic feelings. The Dark itself is a monster, who mated with Swamp vampire women from Venus. Ancient gods and green fertile Mars…
“There were gods who were old when Mars was a green planet, and verdant moon circled an Earth blue with steaming seas, and Venus, molten hot, swung round a younger sun. Another world circled in space then, between Mars and Jupiter where its fragments planetoids are now.”
It is impossible to divorce these stories from their era, and that is not the correct way to read them. If there is a problem with this beautiful modern edition from Gollancz in the UK is the lack of information. A Golden Age Masterworks edition has a slick cover and the back is divided by a description and an Encyclopedia of Science Fiction biography. This is a smart move as her place in the time and era of the genre is a selling point.
That said this edition doesn’t have a table of contents. I think this was a mistake. There is also no information. The back story and publication history of each of the stories were very interesting. As I had to go to the internet to find out what year each story was published I found myself thinking this should be in the book.
Catherine Lucille Moore was born of a strange mating of styles. I kinda thought of her style when I read this sentence.
“I was born of a strange mating, Earthman. My mother was Venusian, but my father- My father was Darkness. I can’t explain…because of the strain of Dark in me I am invisible.”
That is CL Moore in a nutshell, a strange mating of pulp Sci-fi and the blackest of cosmic horror. If she couldn’t write beautiful prose she would not have been able to hang with WT's stable of writers and not only that become one of the voices that built the style the magazine (that just released a new issue) is known for. The prose has that nasty beauty that Lovecraft was known for that edges close to purple prose. The thing she has that Howie struggled with is the fun she had with swords and heat guns. There are moments of light-hearted humor and fun that some of her peers struggled with.
It is sad she retired from writing, but before she did she and her husband Henry Kuttner created a few classics together. She taught writing at USC for many years, and worked in Television briefly. She earned her lifetime achievement awards and as an Indiana horror nerd, I want to do my part to make sure she is remembered.
This book is a great place to start.
“As he swept on through the dark he began to find a tantalizing familiarity in the arrangement of some of those starry groups there were constellations he knew… surely that was Orion, striding across the sky. He saw Betelgeuse’s redly glowing eye, and Rigel’s cold blue blaze. And beyond across the gulfs of darkness, twin Sirius was spinning blue-white against the black.”
Never forget CL Moore...
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