Northwest of Earth
Read Northwest of Earth Online
Authors: C.L. Moore
NORTHWEST OF EARTH
C.L. Moore
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
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For a minute—for two minutes—nothing happened.
Then, watching the wall, Smith thought he could discern the shape of the symbol that had been traced. Somehow it was becoming clear among the painted characters. Somehow a grayness was spreading within the outlines he had watched his own hands trace, a fogginess that strengthened and grew clearer and clearer, until he could no longer make out the traceries enclosed within its boundaries, and a great, misty symbol stood out vividly across the wall.
He did not understand for a moment. He watched the grayness take on density and grow stronger with each passing moment, but he did not understand until a long curl of fog drifted lazily out into the room, and the grayness began to spill over its own edges and eddy and billow as if that wall were afire. And from very far away, over measureless voids, he caught the first faint impact of a power so great that he knew in one flash the full horror of what he watched.
The name, traced upon that wall with its own metal counterpart, had opened a doorway for the Thing which bore the name to enter. It was coming back to the world it had left millions of years ago. It was oozing through the opened door, and nothing he could do would stop it …
“These tales have a peculiar quality of cosmic weirdness, hard to define but easy to recognize, which marks them out as really unique … In these tales there is an indefinable atmosphere of vague outsideness and cosmic dread which marks weird work of the best sort. The distinctive thing about Miss Moore is her ability to devise conditions and sights and phenomena of utter strangeness and originality, and to describe them in a language conveying something of their outre, phantasmagoric, and dread-filled quality.”
—H. P. Lovecraft
“C. L. Moore was a pure romantic whose fantasies remain some of the most vivid and engaging of their kind.”
—Michael Moorcock, creator of Elric of Melniboné
“C. L. Moore’s shimmering, highly colored prose is unique in science fiction. She raised pulp sensibilities to a new level—and then, topped herself in her many collaborations with husband Henry Kuttner. But there’s a freedom and freshness of invention to the Northwest Smith stories that still sings true. Without C. L. Moore, could there be Andre Norton or CJ Cherryh or Anne McCaffrey?”
—Greg Bear, author of
Blood Music
and
Darwin’s Radio
“While you’re reading one of her stories, you believe.”
—CJ Cherryh, author of
Downbelow Station
and
Cyteen
“Moore’s slam-bang storytelling, her exotic touches and her love-to-hate-him antiheroes compel even a veteran SF fan to keep reading.”
—Paul Di Filippo, SciFi.com
“Mythic, heroic, energetic: Moore’s rangy, pale-eyed Northwest Smith came before John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, before Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name, before my own Aud Torvingen. He might be from Mars, but he is the ur-hero of twentieth century adventure.”
—Nicola Griffith, author of
Slow River
and
Ammonite
“There are strains of A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, and even H. P. Lovecraft … Excellent.”
—Fritz Leiber, creator of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
“She had a skill, rare for the field at the time, of extracting the human drama from a science-fictional idea.”
—A Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction
BY C. J. CHERRYH
Catherine Moore—one of the early stars in the science fiction universe, and one of my friends when I first came into the field. I’d grown up with her stories—Northwest Smith, et al., and she opened up vistas to me that just never fade. Sure, Venus and Mars aren’t what we thought they were. But her stories could be set on the inner planets of some other star—just imagine that!
Imagining was her forte. And her skills at description carry you into her worlds, wherever located. The first things of hers I ever read were the Jirel stories—they’re vivid to me to this day, and I was just a kid at the time.
She was married to another important SF writer, Henry Kuttner, and after his passing, continued in her own vein, producing world after world of unique stories. At the time very many writers were doing “Mars” stories or “Venus” stories, some of which have become dated. She wrote worlds so unique they aren’t bound by those labels. They slide between science and supernatural, what-if to once-upon-a-time; and their scope and sweep has a grandeur that just carries you along willy-nilly. While you’re reading one of her stories, you believe.
She created in Jirel one of the early female heroes; in Northwest Smith the sort of character that’s the archetype of Indiana Jones. She delineated unforgettable characters of both genders, having a great sense of adventure that certainly characterized her writing as well as her life. Her characters are young, but they’re timeless. They’re real, but they’re exotic. And they live, long past her too-brief creative lifetime. Her language and her style are what I would call easy, but beautiful—nothing old-fashioned, nothing contrived, just straightforward story-telling of the most unforgettable kind, with the ability to immerse readers of any age into worlds that are incredibly real and full of hazard. Her heroes are never hack-and-slash—they use their wits, and that’s part of her charm. We admire these people. We want to be them. What more can you say of a character?
They’re important stories, landmarks in the evolution of both science fiction and fantasy, all rolled into one. I congratulate Paizo Publishing for their service in publishing these seminal works. I find it exciting that new readers are going to get a chance at what taught the writers of this new century to dream of alien worlds.
I knew her when she was older, at a time when some people just lose their sense of wonder and become distracted into glum attitudes. She had her sense of wonder perfectly intact, and she approached things with a courage that would have made Northwest Smith proud. She didn’t complain about her situation—she just went, and did, and showed us a real example of grace. I felt a real sense of loss when I knew she’d passed, and I remember her too vividly ever to let her go—she was that kind of person.
So when Paizo Publishing wrote me asking me to do this introduction, I didn’t hesitate about it—this is an important book. Read it. Make sure your kids and grandkids read it. It’s timeless, and it’s that good. I won’t spoil what you’re about to experience by giving you any further details, except to say that you’re about to go somewhere marvelous.
Read on.
C.J. Cherryh
Spokane, WA
July, 2007
C. J. C
HERRYH
is the Hugo- and Locus-Award-winning author of
Downbelow Station
and
Cyteen,
and has published more than sixty science fiction and fantasy novels.
M
AN HAS CONQUERED
Space before. You may be sure of that. Somewhere beyond the Egyptians, in that dimness out of which come echoes of half-mythical names—Atlantis, Mu—somewhere back of history’s first beginnings there must have been an age when mankind, like us today, built cities of steel to house its star-roving ships and knew the names of the planets in their own native tongues—heard Venus’s people call their wet world “Sha-ardol” in that soft, sweet, slurring speech and mimicked Mars’s guttural “Lakkdiz” from the harsh tongues of Mars’s dryland dwellers. You may be sure of it. Man has conquered Space before, and out of that conquest faint, faint echoes run still through a world that has forgotten the very fact of a civilization which must have been as mighty as our own. There have been too many myths and legends for us to doubt it. The myth of the Medusa, for instance, can never have had its roots in the soil of Earth. That tale of the snake-haired Gorgon whose gaze turned the gazer to stone never originated about any creature that Earth nourished. And those ancient Greeks who told the story must have remembered, dimly and half believing, a tale of antiquity about some strange being from one of the outlying planets their remotest ancestors once trod.
“Shambleau! Ha … Shambleau!” The wild hysteria of the mob rocketed from wall to wall of Lakkdarol’s narrow streets and the storming of heavy boots over the slag-red pavement made an ominous undernote to that swelling bay, “Shambleau! Shambleau!”
Northwest Smith heard it coming and stepped into the nearest doorway, laying a wary hand on his heat-gun’s grip, and his colorless eyes narrowed. Strange sounds were common enough in the streets of Earth’s latest colony on Mars—a raw, red little town where anything might happen, and very often did. But Northwest Smith, whose name is known and respected in every dive and wild outpost on a dozen wild planets, was a cautious man, despite his reputation. He set his back against the wall and gripped his pistol, and heard the rising shout come nearer and nearer.
