1. SS 166.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, December 2, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
3. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, December 15, 1931 (ms, JHL).
4. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letter to CAS May 28, 1932 (ms, JHL).
The Invisible City
Harry Bates, editor of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, edited a sister genre magazine for publisher William Clayton, Astounding Stories of Super-Science. Smith had not submitted any stories to it despite his success with Strange Tales because its basic formula could be summed up as cowboys and Indians in space. It comes as no surprise that CAS did not have a high opinion of the magazine, telling Lovecraft “Astounding absolutely gags me—in one of the stories, for example, there is a Man from Mars who talks American slang! I shall not buy the magazine again”.1 On the other hand, Bates had already bought two stories from Smith for Strange Tales, and was about to buy three more, one of which he had specially commissioned. It is not surprising, then that Bates wrote to Smith on October 16, 1931 to solicit submission for his science fiction magazine: “I wonder why you can’t write an acceptable short story for our Astounding Stories. I see you do it for our competitors”.2
“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
Despite 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”).