A Vintage From Atlantis (60 page)

“The Invisible City” was the first “scientifiction” story Smith wrote after receiving this invitation. Two plot synopses exist for this story among Smith’s papers. The first dates approximately to 1930, and reads simply “An invisible barrier, like a city wall is encountered by explorers in the Gobi desert. Groping, they find a gate in this wall—and are trapped in an unseen labyrinth of buildings. They spend a night in this labyrinth before escaping”.
³
He would later develop this idea further:

Two explorers, wandering in the Gobi desert, lost, and searching for water, come to a series of strange, regular-shapen pits in the desert floor. Examining these, they find to their amazement that the pits are covered with an invisible, solid substance, that they are walking among unseen walls, on unseen pavements, in what appears to be a maze of buildings wrought of an ice-cold substance absolutely permeable to light. In some of the pits they see the apparently floating bodies of strange creatures, which they take to be mummies. One of the two men falls down a flight of steps, drops his rifle, and is attached by an unseen monster, the minotaur of this strange labyrinth. The other man, following more carefully, manages to shoot the monster in a vital spot, and kills it. The thing becomes visible in death, and putrefies with amazing rapidity. The men escape from the city; and crossing a low ridge, find themselves on the bank of a river which will take them to the huts of desert tribesmen.
⁴

Smith found the actual composition of the story less than satisfying, and expressed concern that it would prove unsaleable. The problem was that it had “not enough atmosphere to make it really good—and too many unexplained mysteries for the scientifiction readers, who simply must have their little formulae. A story in which the “heroes” don’t solve anything would hardly go. To hell with heroes anyway”.
⁵
His fears were realized when, after completing the story on December 15, 1931, Bates rejected it as “too vague and pointless”.
⁶
After finishing some revisions on February 2, 1932, Smith resubmitted the story, but to no avail. Bates’ letters do not survive, but according to Smith it was felt that his stories lacked “human interest” and his heroes “didn’t show enough excitement over their prodigious adventures”.
⁷
(To this last criticism Smith wryly observed “But if anything could be more insouciant than some of the birds who figure in the A.S. yarns—”
⁸
) Having already invested more effort in the story than he probably felt it deserved, Smith sent it along to
Wonder Stories
, where it was accepted by David Lasser on March 5, 1932.
⁹
It appeared on the cover of the June 1932 issue, and Ione Weber was eventually able to extract sixty-five dollars for it from Gernsback’s purse.

Smith probably didn’t know it, but it appears that Gernsback sold the foreign language rights to his story. “The Invisible City” was translated as “Die unsichtbare Stadt” in the ninth issue for 1933 of the German magazine
Bibliothek der Unterhaltung und des Wissens
, published in Stuttgart by Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft. Smith would later sell the rights to the story to the British magazine
Tales of Wonder
, edited by Walter Gillings, and would also take the cover spot.

Smith called the story “a hunk of tripe”,
¹⁰
although Lovecraft praised it as “vivid & ingenious in the extreme—& with enough ‘eckshun’ to please the most exacting clientele”.
¹¹
Lovecraft would later write a story with a similar theme (“In the Walls of Eryx,”
Weird Tales,
October 1939), but the idea for this story came from his teenage collaborator, Kenneth Sterling (1920-1995), who identified his inspiration as Edmond Hamilton’s “The Monster-God of Mamurth” (
Weird Tales
, August 1926).
¹²

1. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. late October 1930 (
SL
123)].

2. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, October 16, 1931 (ms, JHL).

3.
SS
158-59.

4.
SS
172-73.

5. CAS, letter to AWD, December 12, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, January 31, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

7. CAS, letter to AWD, February 10, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

8. CAS, letter to AWD, February 24, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

9. David Lasser, letter to CAS, March 5, 1932 (private collection).

10. CAS, letter to AWD, March 15, 1932 (
SL
173).

11. HPL, note to CAS [Postmarked May 13, 1932] (courtesy of S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz).

12. S. T. Joshi,
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
(West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996), p. 604.

The Immortals of Mercury

D
espite his unpleasant experience with “The Invisible City,” Smith found the two cents a word paid by the Clayton magazines as alluring as any pilgrim to Ydmos found the call of the Singing Flame. His next attempt to storm the barricades at
Astounding Stories
was “The Immortals of Mercury.” The planet closest to the sun apparently excited his imagination, as story ideas such as “The Ghoul from Mercury” and “The Conquest of Mercury” were found among his papers. One such idea, “A Sojourn in Mercury,” follows: “The terrestrial explorer, landing in the twilight zone of the dark frozen side of Mercury, who is driven forth by the inhabitants toward the burning desert of the side toward the sun”.
¹
A later version of this idea follows immediately after the second outline of “The Invisible City,” the title now reading “The Immortals of Mercury:”

An explorer caught by the aboriginals of Mercury, who is tied to the back of a salamander-like monster that carries him away into the sun-ward deserts of the planet. Almost swooning with the insupportable heat, he sees the lifting of an artificial lid in the desert floor, and is rescued and carried into subterranean regions by strange beings who have achieved immortality by wearing clothes of a material that excludes the destructive cosmic rays.
²

Smith began the composition of the story around the middle of December 1931, but its completion was delayed until mid-January because his mother became ill with an infected heel, which required him both to care for her and to accomplish the chores she usually performed.
He was not overly pleased with the completed product, describing it as “a lot of tripe, I’m afraid; but if it brings me a 200.00 dollar check, [it] will have served its purpose”.
³
Lovecraft, as usual, offered his support, telling Smith encouragingly “What you suggest about ‘The Immortals of Mercury’ sounds alluring, even though concessions to Claytonism may have been made”.
⁴
Unfortunately, Bates rejected the story for the same reasons discussed above (see “The Invisible City”).

In order to increase the chances of its acceptance by Farnsworth Wright, Smith rewrote the tale to give it “a grim and terrific ending”,
⁵
which led HPL to observe ironically “for once commercial pressure may have an effect other than deleterious—leading you into some potent realism which you would not otherwise have introduced”.
⁶
(This remark was related to a running exchange between Smith and Lovecraft concerning the relative merits of romanticism versus realism in the weird tale.) Wright declined to use “The Immortals of Mercury,” preferring instead to serialize such immortal classics as Victor Rousseau’s “The Phantom Hand” (
Weird Tales
, July through November 1932) and public domain novels like
Frankenstein
.

David Lasser accepted “The Immortals of Mercury,” mentioning that they might print it as a separate pamphlet rather than use it in either
Wonder Stories
or its sister quarterly.
⁷
The booklet appeared early that summer, with Lovecraft writing Smith that he found it waiting for him upon his return from a trip to New Orleans:

It would have been much better, I fancy, if not deprived of the parts you mention—but even as it is it furnishes more than one authentic shudder. It ought to have “eckshun” enough to suit even the canny Gernsback, & in addition, the later parts give a very real thrill of subterrene horror. Glad that Hugo & Co. didn’t demand a happy ending—the present abrupt punch comes as a magnificently ironic touch.
⁸

According to the accounts obtained by his attorney, Ione Weber, Smith was due eighty dollars from Gernsback’s Stellar Publication Corporation for the story’s publication as
Science Fiction Series
no. 16, a rather unprepossessing pamphlet issued with no cover illustration. The story was included in
TSS
. No complete manuscript exists, although we were able to examine several pages of a first draft for “Immortals.” We also compared the text from
TSS
with that of a copy of the 1932 pamphlet corrected by Smith, and between them were able to correct most of the numerous typographical errors that crept into both editions.

1.
SS
160.

2.
SS
173.

3. CAS, letter to Derleth, January 19, 1932 (ms, SHSW). Two hundred dollars is what
Astounding Stories
would have paid for the ten thousand word novelette.

4. HPL, letter to CAS [postmarked January 28, 1932] (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, February 21, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

6. HPL, letter to CAS, February 26, 1932 (AHT).

7. David Lasser, letter to CAS, March 16, 1932 (ms, JHL).

8. HPL, letter to CAS, July 10, 1932 (AHT).

The Empire of the Necromancers

I
n this story Smith introduced what Brian Stableford has called “the most dramatically appropriate”
¹
of his secondary worlds, Zothique. Will Murray,
²
Steve Behrends
³
and Jim Rockhill
⁴
have all discussed the origins of this series in some depth, tracing its origins as far back as Smith’s 1911 poem “The Last Night”
⁵
and a brief sketch “Account of an Actual Dream—1912.”
⁶
CAS described it to L. Sprague de Camp as “the last inhabited continent of earth” where the “science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days.”
⁷
The first use of the name occurs in a synopsis for “Vizaphmal in Ophiuchus,” a never-completed sequel to “The Monster of the Prophecy,” where it referred to a world in another solar system, that he plotted in April 1930.
⁸
In February 1931 he came up with the idea of “Gnydron, a continent of the far future, in the South Atlantic, which is more subject to incursions of ‘outsideness’ than any former terrene realm; and more liable to the visitation of beings from galaxies not yet visible; also, to shifting admixtures and interchanges with other dimensions or planes of entity”.
⁹

Also in 1930 CAS scribbled an idea about the exploitation of the dead by the living, which he called “The Empire of the Necromancers:” “Two sorcerers, who raise up an entire people from the dead, in order that they may reign over them. The dead, however, revolt against being brought back to life”.
¹⁰
The idea laid dormant, much like the people of Cincor, until he developed the plot further in August or September 1931:

A story told by a man centuries dead—the prince of a perished people. He and all his subjects are raised up from death to be the slaves of two necromancers greedy of dominion and power. These people, living a ghostly, hollow, shadow-like existence, are driven to toil for the necromancers, are tortured for their sadistic pleasure, made to serve their necrophilic lusts. The prince, learning the secret of their power, and throwing off their spell in a measure, resolves to rescue his people from this terrible doom. He contrives that the necromancers shall themselves die, to awaken at a stated time and find themselves among the living dead. Then he and his people, freed from their slavery, seek the oblivion of a second death by flinging themselves into the subterranean fires beneath the kingdom.
¹¹

Smith worked on it at the same time as, and possibly as an antidote to, “The Invisible City” and “The Immortals of Mercury,” completing it on January 7, 1932. “There is a queer mood in this little tale; and, like my forthcoming, ‘The Planet of the Dead,’ it is muchly overgreened with what H. P. once referred to as the ‘verdigris of decadence’.”
¹²
HPL called it “great—one of the best things I’ve seen lately—& I’m immensely glad to learn that it has landed with Wright”.
¹³
“The Empire of the Necromancers” was the most popular story in the September 1932 issue of
Weird Tales.
It was collected in
LW
and
RA
. This text is based upon two carbon copies of the typescript, one at JHL forming part of Smith’s papers, and another presented by CAS to Lester Anderson, a Bay Area science fiction fan, that incorporates some holograph changes that do not appear on either the JHL copy or the published text . This presentation copy was purchased by the Bancroft Library a few years ago as part of a large lot of Smith’s letters, manuscripts and other ephemera.