Fury by Henry Kuttner
There is something weird and magical about Science fiction from long ago.
Reading a story about the future written by a person living eight decades ago
takes on a bizarro vibe that is its own thing. Fury packaged as it was
in the copy I read is labeled a masterwork, and it was that when it was
written, but now it reads so differently, still a masterpiece, but entirely of
its time. It is not timeless as I would argue I Am Legend, or Canticle
for Lebowitz are. A novel can be super out of date like most of PKD’s
novels and still be a masterwork.
Sure, the science of Venus was wildly out of date, even Asimov was still
publishing about oceans on Venus seven years later in Lucky Starr and the
Oceans of Venus. It is not just the planetary science but the science
fictional themes of mutants who live hundreds of years mixed with thieves who
talk about bombs being hidden in the dough. Nothing places your novel in the
past more than referring to cash as “The Dough,” It is a strange alternate
universe you find in the 1940s SF novel.
Fury first appeared as a sequel to the short story “Clash by Night” in
the May 1947 issue of Astounding magazine edited of course by the now
controversial figure John W. Campbell. It appears with a Theodore Sturgeon novelette.
It appeared under the byline Lawrence
O'Donnell, one of many pen names employed by the science fiction power
couple Catherine Lucille Moore and Henry Kuttner. It was the cover story. Fury
is now considered the product of Henry Kuttner, but Moore claimed that she may
have written ⅛ of the text. How she came to that number, it appears she
credited most of this novel with her husband.
You can read the original appearance on Internet Archive: As it first appeared.
This story appeared during a period when the couple was living in New
York City and prolifically producing future classics ranging from the time
travel novella Vintage Season to the SF Hall of Fame story Mimzy were
the Borogoves. In 1947 alone they delivered three novels "The Fairy
Chessmen," (an influence on a 1967 treatment for a novel Philip K.
Dick didn’t end up writing) "Valley of the Flame" and
"The Dark World." I recently read this quote from
Catherine Moore from the 70s. “When you write for a living, you have to
write a tremendous lot of copy. Three days before rent is due, if you haven't
got money in the bank, you write a story, regardless, then you rush down and
give it to the publishers. By this time we had formed a happy association with
several publishing houses in New York, and they would take the story in, read
it quickly, and give Hank a check he would walk home because we didn't have an
extra nickel for the subway…” (Science Fiction An Oral History edited by Scott
Apel)
Authors at the time hustling would often write stories to the sensibility
of certain editors, it wasn’t the authors obsessed with psi-powers and supermen
but Campbell. The supermen of Fury can’t fly but they can live for
hundreds of years and avoid the suffering of being almost slaves.
“Their early years merged into the unremembered past. Time moved more
slowly for Sam then. Days and hours dragged. The man and woman he knew as
father and mother had nothing in common with him, even then for the operation
had altered his mind; His intelligence, his ingenuity; he had inherited from
half-mutant ancestors. Though the mutation was merely one of longevity that
trait had made it possible for the harkers to rise to dominance on Venus. They
were not only long-lived ones, by any means; There were a few hundred others
who had a life expectancy of two to 700 years depending on various complicated
factors. That the strain bred through. It was easy to identify them.”
For those who love effective world-building Fury, is a master
class, in a subtle, matter-of-fact way we are introduced to this colony called
the Keeps that was built in the aftermath of an atomic war, under the seas of
Venus. If you can’t handle a novel set in an ocean on a world we now know is too
hot for an ocean, then I am sorry you have a boring imagination.
Sam Harker (Reed eventually) is a fascinating character in the long
history of the hero’s Journey. Living in the Keeps under sea Venus
colonies were named for American states. Classism in this society is a division
of working-class natural humans and mutants who are called immortals so far
they have lived a few hundred years but the experiment has just begun.
The novel is broken up into three parts, as it was essentially designed to be a
serial in Astounding so the story is broken up into three parts. The rumor is
that they sold part one and Campbell rushed it into production in Astounding
before it was even finished. Is that true? Hard to say but it sounds right. If
you don’t want spoilers this is a good place to bounce.
Sam was born into the working class, and the early chapters of the novel
highlight the various levels of the unofficial caste system under the seas on
Venus. It is all the backcover description, so it is not much of a spoiler to
point out that Sam finds out he is immortal. This happens after he is drugged
by something called ‘Dream Dust’. He wakes up forty years later, he hasn’t aged
and that is when the rage sets in. His father lied to him, he hasn’t aged while
asleep so he quickly figures out his immortal.
Sam is driven by the fury, that he was denied this birthright, but drives
him to tear down the system, and move his people from the undersea Citadels and
rebuild society Overground jungles. The story might seem tilted to a kind of
pulp action but it is more in the vein of intrigue and Socio-political dynamics.
This wouldn’t work without effective and
well written world-building.
“Carnival was a respected
custom. All Delaware Keep was shining. Colored perfumes hung like a haze above
the Moving Ways, clinging to the merrymakers as they passed. It was a time when
all classes mingled.
Technically there were no lower classes….”
It is descriptive and well-written with 40s style future tech like Moving
Ways, and telecast visors. The novel is filled with things like the almost VR-styled
natural habitat.
“Haven approximated man's half-forgotten birthplace. It was earth, but an
earth glamorized and inaccurately remembered it was a gigantic half dome
honeycombed with cells that made a shell arched over a public room below. Each
cell could be blocked off, or a rearrangement of penetrating rays to give you
the illusion of being in the midst of an immense, crowded room or you could use
the architect's original plan and enjoy the illusion of a terrestrial
background.”
The setting is great, and Golden Age SF is constantly accused of being
about ideas to the point of sacrificing the characters. Sam as a character is
driven by a rage that parallels the wild ecology of this savage Venus. Sam felt
his father intentionally doomed him after his mother died giving birth to him. His
mother’s death happens on the first page, Sam’s father hated him from the
moment he was born.
“But Sam reads anger was a rage Against intangibles like time and
destiny, and the only target it could find to explode against was himself.
Granted that such anger is not normal in a man. But Sam Reed was not normal. His
father before him could not have been normal, or he would never have taken such
disproportionate vengeance on his son. A flaw somewhere in the harbor blood was
responsible for the bitter rage in which father and son alike lived out their
days, far separate, raging against far different things, but in armed rebellion
all their lives, both of them, against life itself.”
Sam plays the hero role because he wants to change the stagnant society.
He starts in foster care no idea who his real father is, and rises through a
crime family. Knowing what he could have been opens his eyes.
“There was something like a bright explosion in the center of his brain.
Immortality! Immortality! All the possibilities, all the dangers all the
glories lying before him burst outward in one blinding glow, and then the glow
faded and he was afraid for a moment of maturity responsibilities this new
incredible maturity so far beyond anything he'd ever dreamed of before.”
Sam leads the movement that would in a typical pulp novel end with all
the wild lifeforms on Venus or the Technology in the Keeps. The story always
finds ways to transcend the normal Golden Age weaknesses and come back to the characters.
"I know Sam Reed. Don't forget his background. During his formative years,
he thought of himself as a short termer. He's got a tremendously strong
instinct for self-preservation, because of the life he lived in the Keeps.”
Overall the book really explores many themes and ideas I was excited to
find. There are plenty of side characters including the one oracle-wise wizard
type who is character who explains what all this anger and fury as wrought.
“Back in the 20th century a lot of men knew what was going to
happen to earth. They said so. They said it loud and often. And they were men
who earned public respect. They should have been believed maybe they were, by a
lot of people. But not enough. The minds of men kept right on working in the
same set patterns. And so we lost earth.”
It is not the guns or the rockets, the bombs burned away the atmosphere
of earth but it was driven by FURY, something that exists in the mind.
“The future is the mind of man it wasn’t an atomic power that destroyed Earth.
It was a pattern of thought.”
Fury is a Golden Age pulp novel that punches way above its weight class.
It is one of the best works of the Moore/Kuttner duo. It is a must-read for
those who love old-school Science Fiction.
