Seekers of Tomorrow (44 page)

Henry Kuttner was one of those approached, but because of his tarnished reputation a pen name was considered essen-tial. He chose "Lewis Padgett." Lewis was Kuttner's mother's maiden name, and Padgett was Moore's grandmother's maid-en name.

The first story under the Padgett name,
Deadlock
(as-tounding science-fiction, August, 1942), obviously was in-tended to emulate Asimov's highly popular series of amusing robot stories, but it barely passed muster.
The Twonky,
in the September issue, struck a highly original note; a radio which is really a robot censors reading matter, drinking habits, and other things possibly harmful to its owner, while obligingly pitching in to wash the dishes. The style, reading like some-thing new to the science-fiction audience, was actually simu-lated John Collier. The result was widely praised. This story could have been the inspiration of
"With Folded Hands
..." and ". . .
And of Searching Mind,"
the Jack Williamson stories about robots which never, under any circumstances, will permit humans to do anything that might be harmful to themselves.

The third story,
Piggy Bank,
in the December, 1942, issue of astounding science-fiction, reverted to the Asimov robot formula, but the fourth,
Time Locker
(astounding science-fiction, June, 1943) was not a robot story and was a small masterpiece involving a locker that emptied into the future, and the man who killed himself using it. It was slickly written with an adroit twist that could not have been antici-pated by the readers. Kuttner's own name appeared on a second story in that issue, ". . .
Nothing but Gingerbread
Left,"
the title from a verse of Lewis Carroll. No one linked it with the Padgett story in the February issue carrying the Carrollian title,
Mimsy Were the Borogoves.
It dealt with toys from our future projected back in time to the present; they are found by youngsters who devise from them a formu-la for entering a non-Euclidean universe, disappearing for-ever from the sight of their parents. Immediately recognized as a classic in the field, it is quite obvious that this story served as the inspiration for
The Veldt
by Ray Bradbury, and possibly for his whole series of childhood-centered stories. At that time, Kuttner was personally helping Bradbury on his career, even to the extent of rewriting some of his stories. Later he would help Richard Matheson in the same way.

Shock,
in the March, 1943, astounding science-fiction, about a genius out of time who develops to be an escapee from a padded cell of the future, set the pattern for similar tales to come, including Gore Vidal's TV and stage play
Visit from a Small Planet.

The same issue saw Lawrence O'Donnell's debut with
Clash by Night,
plot derived and expanded from Clifford D. Simak's
Rim of the Deep
dealing with a Venusian culture where all civilization survives in the

"keeps," giant domes beneath the seas. This one Kuttner wrote on his own, but he had the help of Moore for the novel-length sequel
Fury
(1947), dramatizing the conflict between the long-lived and short-lived Venusians. Though primarily action stories, both proved very popular.

When the news eventually broke that Henry Kuttner was both Lewis Padgett
and
to some degree Lawrence O'Donnell, all past transgressions were forgiven if not completely for-gotten by the readers. Their enthusiasm was partially predi-cated on superior craftsmanship, partially on the desire to see the underdog come out on top, but predominantly because Kuttner usually reminded them of someone they liked. A superbly proficient literary mimic, Kuttner usually wrote like whoever was in demand at the time. He left the Medical Corps in 1945 and for a while the Kuttners lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. He moved back to Laguna Beach, California, and, in 1950, entered the University of Southern California as a freshman under the GI Bill of Rights. He felt acutely that he needed to find himself. Always weak in science, he included physics among his cours-es. His wife, too, went back to school. In 1954 he received his B.A. He had finished his thesis for his M.A., but died from an acute coronary on February 3, 1958. In 1957 the Kuttners had been hired by Warner Bros, to do a screenplay for Nathaniel Hawthorne's science-fiction masterpiece,
Rappaccini's Daughter.
Work had been started when a depression hit Hollywood and the idea was canceled. A month later they signed a contract to do a TV show and were in the midst of a revision when Henry died. As she had so often in the past, Catherine finished the script. In the cold light of critical appraisal, detaching oneself from a man's likability as a human being, the introduction of the John Collier type of sophisticated fantasy into the science-fiction magazines was Kuttner's major contribution.
Presenting Moonshine
by Collier, published by Viking in 1941, comprising dozens of artistically superb fantastic iro-nies, had taken the literati by storm. Its popularity resulted in a Readers Club Edition in 1943 under the title of
A Touch of Nutmeg.
Like
Mimsy Were the Borogoves,
the almost-as-popular
Call Him Demon
(thrilling wonder stories, Fall, 1946, published under the pen name Keith Hammond), in which the children realize their "Uncle" is the physical mani-festation of an extradimensional monster and sacrifice their grandmother to feed its appetite, is a variation of Collier's
Thus
I Refute Beelzy.

Kuttner felt, and many agree, that his best story in this vein was
Don't Look Now
(startling stories, March, 1948), in which a man at a bar warns his drinking companion to be on the lookout for Martians, who can be recognized by a third eye in their forehead. As he walks away the listener opens his third eye and stares at him. The story has since been done frequently on television.

The Shock, The Twonky,
and
Time Locker
(converted into a robot story to fill out the collection
Robots Have No Tails,
Gnome Press, 1952) are essentially in the same catego-ry with the addition of a diverting potpourri of fantastic elements, too rich for the blood of the uninitiate but grist for the mills of the science-fiction fans.

Kuttner's A. E. van Vogt kick, most obviously apparent in his well-done "Baldies" series, of which he wrote all but
Beggars in Velvet
(collectively published as
Mutant
by Gnome Press in 1953), are variations on
Slan. The Fairy Chessman
and
Tomorrow and Tomorrow,
though creditable, are also attempts to duplicate the methods of van Vogt

The Kentucky Hogben series which ran in thrilling wonder stories in 1947-49 (the last of which,
Cold
War,
was completely written by Moore from a plot supplied by Kuttner), dealing with a family of hillbilly mutations, were ludicrously unbelievable comedies blatantly drawn from a series which Murray Leinster wrote under the name William Fitzgerald in the same magazine, about a character called Bud Gregory. The popular A. Merritt imitations, beginning with
Earth's Last Citadel,
serialized in argosy in 1943, reached a height of popularity with
Dark World
in the Summer, 1946, star-tling stories, with its obvious echoes of
Dwellers in the Mirage.
The group obtained a note of authenticity from the contributions of Moore, whose colorful style at times was reminiscent of Merritt.

Who was the real Henry Kuttner? We will never know. The man had discipline, technical brilliance, immense versa-tility, and ingenuity, and these betrayed him. Lured by oppor-tunism, suffering from an acute sense of inadequacy, he refused to stand alone, but leaned on others for support: H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Stanley G. Weinbaum, A. Merritt, John Collier, A. E. van Vogt, and, of course, C. L. Moore. 

Robert Bloch catapulted to public attention and accelerated success when Alfred Hitchcock's production of his novel
Psycho
not only shocked the nation and the critics, but boasted the second largest gross in the history of black-and-white motion pictures. This tale of the murder of a young girl in the shower of her motel room and the suspicion that focuses on a querulous old woman, who is heard but never seen, and her son, who appears to be covering for her, ends with an explosive impact that Hitchcock regarded as

"tech-nically the most satisfying" of any of his productions.

As those who have seen the picture know, the mother has been dead for years and the son has a split personality and talks to himself in a striking simulation of his mother's voice; he is in fact the actual murderer of the girl.

What, it might be asked, has all this to do with science fiction? The answer is: very little, except that Bloch has spent a good part of his lifetime as a fan and writer building a public image as a pillar of science fiction while scoring most of his successes outside of the field. He was guest of honor of the Sixth Annual World Science Fiction Convention in To-ronto, Canada, July 3-5, 1948, and was anticipating the psychiatric punch line of
Psycho
when he prefaced his talk on "Fantasy and Psychology" by mimicking Peter Lorre in an animated stream-of-consciousness manner. Yet, for five years preceding the honor, science-fiction writing had made up a relatively minor portion of his work.

He received a Hugo for the best science-fiction short story of the year,
That Hell-Bound Train
(the magazine of fan-tasy and science fiction, September, 1958), a story built around a pact with the devil, a theme which does not belong in the science-fiction canon except allegorically. It is obvious that Robert Bloch is a paradox, a special case, and a privileged character. How did he get that way?

He was born April 5, 1917, in Chicago, the first child of Paphael A. Bloch, a bank cashier, and Stella Loeb Bloch, a school teacher and social worker. Twenty-two months later a sister, Winifred, was born. Though his parents were of German-Jewish extraction, most of the religious instruction he received was at the Methodist Church in Maywood, a suburb of Chicago. This was not due to any change in the family's religious persua-sion, but resulted from the closeness with which his family's social activities were interwoven with those of the commu-nity.

Both parents had an abiding interest in the performing arts. His mother once turned down an offer to go into light opera, where she might have capitalized on an excellent singing voice. She was also a fine pianist and accompanist. The theater and vaudeville were his father's notion of grand entertainment. As a result, young Robert was introduced to the fabulous world of living players when it was still at its peak. At the same time he was privileged to watch the parade of stars of the silent screen: Lon Chaney, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Rudolph Valentino, and nostalgic scores of others. Most children live a good part of the time in a make-believe world, but Robert Bloch rarely left it, recruiting the neighborhood youngsters for an endless series of "dramatic" plays, circuses, mock wars (with hundreds of lead soldiers), and "situation" games. The escapism was overdone, but it was largely accomplished in concert with other children, with Bloch showing signs of leadership. His exceptional ability as a student quickly changed all that. Repeatedly skipping grades, he soon found himself lone-ly in the company of much older children who could not be commandeered to participate in his fun. Nor was he capable of physically matching them in sports. This forced a partial introversion and a dependence on the vicarious thrills and intellectual pleasures of books.

An economic turn for the worse in his parents' financial status in 1927 had the effect of socially cutting him off from the world. The bank where his father worked failed. So did a second at which he had procured another job. There were straws in the wind leading up to the 1929 Wall Street crash, but no one was properly interpreting them. His mother re-sumed social work to help support the family and they moved to another town. Now the ten-year-old boy knew no one. The necessity of taking care of his younger sister while his mother was at work hampered still further his making new friends. Lon Chaney's motion picture
The Phantom of the Opera
scared the hell out of him, but it also converted him to the world of psychiatric terror and the supernatural. His intro-duction to the fantasy magazines came in August, 1927, when he was in a railroad station with his parents and his aunt. The aunt offered to buy him any magazine on the stands. To her consternation he gleefully selected the current issue of weird tales, featuring Otis Adelbert Kline's
The Bride of Osiris,
with a partially nude girl on the cover. Two issues later he really "flipped" when he read H. P. Lovecraft's
Pickman's Model,
a frightening tale of a painter who drew monsters from "real life."

His conversion to science-fiction magazines came with the February, 1928, amazing stories, featuring
The Revolt of the Pedestrians
by David H. Keller, M.D., a tale of city folk who gradually lose their ability to walk as a result of over-mechanization.

Gradually the effects of the Depression on his family caused the fantasy magazine purchases to cease. His father became afflicted with a strange malady that caused gradual paralysis of his lower limbs, was unable to obtain work as a bank teller, and was grateful to find employment as a night cashier in a restaurant. The family moved from place to place as the whims of economics dictated. At Milwaukee's Lincoln High School, Bloch coasted in his studies but went full tilt into "dramatics." The stage appealed strongly to him, particularly comedy, and he not only acted but wrote skits as well. Bloch's scintillating wit and superb sense of pace, subsequently demonstrated in his numerous appearances as master of ceremonies at science-fiction affairs, had their origin here. He wanted to be a comic so bad he could taste it, vaudeville was disappearing and, with it, burlesque. The Depression was scarcely the time to begin a nightclub career. His activities on the school stage won him popularity, however, and he was five times elected head of the Student Council. As he grew older, the difference in age between him and the other students didn't matter as much. His circle of friends began to widen. In 1932 he resumed buying weird tales, encountering Lovecraft's stories again. Strongly impressed, he wrote the author a fan letter. He was amazed to receive a friendly response and soon a correspondence ensued, during which time he sent Lovecraft trial literary efforts for criticism, some of which had been rejected by weird tales' editor Farns-worth Wright. Lovecraft suggested the science-fiction fan magazines and sent him copies of the fantasy fan, contain-ing his series of poems,
Fungii From Yuggoth,
as well as recommending William Crawford's semiprofessional fantasy magazine, marvel tales. It was there that Bloch first saw print with
Lilies,
a moving short-short story of an old lady who every Saturday night brings flowers from the country to her upstairs neighbors, reaching a climax when she brings the funeral lilies her son has left at her bier after her death. That issue was Winter, 1934, but a previously announced story by Bloch,
The Madness of Lucian Gray,
never appeared, pos-sibly because it was patterned too closely after Lovecraft's
Pickman's Model,
the advance blurb reading: "a weird-fantasy story of an artist who was forced to paint a picture ... and the frightful thing that came from it." A second story accepted by Crawford appeared in unusu-al stories, a companion magazine, after Bloch had already made a number of sales nearly a year later. Titled
Black Lotus,
it dealt with a man who cut his own throat in a dream. The story was a minute stylistic recreation of a certain period in Lovecraft's writing when he was heavily influenced by the technique of Lord Dunsany. Readers were thus confronted, as they would be again when Henry Kuttner began to sell, with the ludicrous spectacle of a Lovecraft-struck acolyte imitating Lovecraft's imitation of Dunsany.