“Defiance”

  Acolyte, Winter 1945

  The church bells toll on sabbath morn

  And I must don my finest gown,

  And with my family sally forth

  To go to church in Hilltop-town.

  Yes, I must step through yawning doors

  Into that holy atmosphere,

  While all within me crawls and cringes,

  Half in loathing, half in fear.

  And I must sit with folded hands

  Sedate and prim within my chair,

  And listen to the preacher’s drone

  And bow my head in humble prayer.

  And I must sing their foolish hymns

  And raise my voice in harmony.

  But I insert a word or two

  And change it to a blasphemy.

  At all these good and holy things

  My inward spirit doth rebel,

  And fervently, though silently,

  I call upon the King of Hell.

  I pity these poor simple folk

  Who spend their lives on bended knee.

  Uninteresting people they,

  How boring paradise must be!

  You ask, do I not dread the day

  When I must for my sins atone?

  Ah no, Hell is a welcome place.

  I know the Devil loves his own!

  My family is a pious lot,

  And by their laws I must abide,

  But they forget. In Salem-town

  Some of their forebears lived and died.

  My great-great-grandma, long ago,

  Was burned for deeds that she had done.

  ’Tis said that I resemble her.

  I do … and in more ways than one!

  “Affinity”

  Acolyte, Spring 1945

  You, too, are tainted with the Vampire strain

  The same blood surges through us both, like wine.

  No wonder that our thoughts and moods combine

  And merge beyond the common, earthly plane.

  Forbidden arts, weird rites, and devil lore,

  Such things are legends now, but they have been

  Reality beyond mere human ken,

  And they shall flourish in this world once more.

  No longer must I walk the earth alone.

  Together we shall prowl in ebon nights

  And share our secret joys and dark delights

  While venturing into the vast unknown,

  Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, thou art

  My shadow, twin, and living counterpart.

  LILITH LORRAINE (1894–1967) was a pioneering American SF author, poet, and editor (for more details about her life, see the entry on Lorraine in chapter 1, “Authors,” of this anthology). While she was involved in nearly every aspect of early SF production, her contributions to the development of genre poetry were particularly noteworthy. When she began publishing short stories in the early 1930s, Lorraine described herself as a “sometimes poet,” but by the end of the decade she was almost exclusively writing and publishing verse. August Derlith featured her work in the weird poetry anthology Fire and Sleet and Candlelight (1961), and Lorraine’s own Wine of Wonder (1952) was touted as the first anthology of SF verse. In the 1940s Lorraine created the Avalon World Arts Academy as a training ground for mainstream and speculative poets alike, many of whom were featured in the two little magazines she began publishing at that time: the Raven, a zine dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe, and Different, a publication devoted to politically engaged fantastic fiction and poetry. In 1950 she brought out Challenge, the first dedicated SF poetry magazine. Challenge folded after just four issues, but Lorraine continued to edit the Raven and other SF poetry magazines and anthologies until her death in 1967. Over the course of her career, she received several prizes, “including the Arizona State Poetry Prize, a Gold Medal and citation from the Governor of Morelos, Mexico, and the Old South Award from the Poetry Society of Texas” (Wagner, n.p.).

  Along with fellow genre poets Clark Ashton Smith and Stanton A. Coblentz, Lorraine led the Cosmic or Stellar poetry movement, advocating the use of “powerfully colorful imagery” to convey to readers “the vastness of time and space [and] futures wondrous or terrible” (Sneyd, Fierce 13). As a political progressive and the only Cosmic poet who began in SF rather than weird fiction, it is perhaps no surprise that Lorraine often celebrates in her verse the possibility of collective human action leading to the end of scarcity and the beginning of human dominion over the universe, as in her first professional SF poem, “Earthlight on the Moon” (1941). But Lorraine was nothing if not multidimensional, and in poems such as “The Acolytes” (1946), she projects futures where eldritch powers gain dominion over Earth—much to the delight of the narrator, who welcomes any change in the human status quo. Elsewhere, Lorraine’s poetry more directly criticizes capitalist greed, as in the 1946 poem “Men Keep Strange Trysts,” which was included in Lorraine’s FBI file as proof of her suspect politics. Taken together, these works illustrate Lorraine’s belief that poetry “is the atomic energy of the soul, which exploded against the battlements of hate and terror will level them in the dust of oblivion and leave the liberated soul free in an expanding universe” (Lorraine, “Story” 4).

  “Earthlight on the Moon”

  Stirring Science Stories, June 1941

  Yes, we shall see them, men against the stars,

  A federated planet, proud and free;

  When grown aweary of their pygmy wars,

  They hurl their legions through eternity.

  Yes, we shall see their silver starships daring

  Wherever worlds are waiting to be won,

  Against the battlements of darkness faring,

  Against the flaming fortress of the sun.

  And then at least when against their gods of greed they leaven,

  And glorify the man of simple worth,

  Then we shall see them pluck the stars from heaven,

  And set them in the diadem of Earth.

  Yes, poets at last shall sing and lovers croon

  Beneath the emerald Earthlight on the moon.

  “The Acolytes”

  Acolyte, Spring 1946

  The Elder Ones are stirring as the red

  Stallions of chaos champ their bits with rage;

  And they have sent their messengers ahead

  Proud with the knowledge of their alienage.

  They walk apart from men, the Acolytes,

  By stagnant pools and rotting sepulchers,

  Whispering of dark, delirious delights,

  As young gods die among their worshippers.

  They dream of dim dimensions where the towers

  Of Yuggoth pierce the decomposing dome

  Of skies where dead stars float like evil flowers

  Afloat on tideless seas of poisoned foam.

  Black tapers glow on many a ruined shrine,

  The patterns coalesce—the good, the bad—

  The old familiar stars no longer shine—

  And I—and I—am curiously glad.

  “Men Keep Strange Trysts”

  Different, June–July 1946

  Men keep strange trysts before the Judgment Day;

  Meet many a Dark Companion face to face;

  Sign fearful covenants, the crimson way,

  Beneath the thick veil of the commonplace.

  Covens more colorful but less accursed

  Profaned the dawn-world—demon-wings were wide—

  They cast a fearful shadow at their worst,

  But seared no offending countryside.

  Gone are the lost, ineffable delights

  Evoked from witches’ urn and wizard-spell—

  But nations sell their souls in scarlet rites,

  And gold is still the currency of hell.

  3

  JOURNALISTS

  SF and science journalism have long been intertwined. One of the first modern science journalists was H. G. Wells, and many of the newspapers and magazines that first published science columns published SF stories as well (History). Conversely, science writing has been part of genre magazine culture since its inception. As in other areas of SF, women contributed to the development of this tradition in diverse ways, producing everything from short filler pieces on basic science to lavishly illustrated and densely researched serial columns on controversial topics, including race, gender, and evolution. For the most part, these authors followed the new rules for science writing developed by the newspaper publisher E. W. Scripps’s Science Service. But their writing was also characterized by a willingness to redefine the process of scientific discovery, a desire to assert lay authority, and a celebration of the fine line between fact and fiction that was characteristic of the early SF community and that anticipates new styles of science journalism today.

  Modern science journalism emerged at the turn of the century in tandem with the professionalization of both science and newspaper publishing. Following the “information” versus “story” models of reporting that were fashionable at the time, early forays into science journalism were either dry and technical or sensational and derisive of science as an egghead endeavor (Roggenkamp xii). Wells—who wrote science essays for Nature, the Fortnightly Review, and the Pall Mall Gazette—was one of the first writers to propose a way out of this dilemma. As he argued in an 1894 issue of Nature, “The fundamental principles of construction that underlie stories such as Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ or Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ series are precisely those that should guide a scientific writer” (qtd. in Rensberger 1055). For Wells, it was not a matter of choosing between information and story-based modes of reporting. Instead, science journalists could help readers better appreciate science and technology by presenting information in a narrative form modeled on one of the most popular modes of storytelling in Wells’s day: detective fiction.1

  The kind of change that Wells envisioned occurred with the creation of Science Service in 1921. Founded by the newspaper publisher Edward W. Scripps, the zoology professor William E. Ritter, and representatives from the National Academy of Science, the National Research Council, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science Service was created to maintain government support for scientific endeavors begun during World War I, combat public fascination with pseudoscience, and even facilitate the workings of democracy. As the journalism historian David J. Rhees explains, facilitating the democratic process was particularly important to Scripps, who believed that “the task of popularization was to ‘democratize’ science and bring it within the reach of many.” By translating scientific ideas into “plain United States” English, citizens would have “the basis for forming intelligent opinions on matters of national importance.” Scripps’s timing could not have been better: the events of World War I and the development of new domestic, communication, and transportation technologies made Americans curious about everything from chemistry to psychology to automobile production. By 1929 Science Service provided content to more than a hundred newspapers while experimenting with novel services, including public radio broadcasts, earthquake forecasting, and on-site fact checking for archeological finds.

  Science Service’s success derived in large part from the innovative writing techniques developed by Scripps. The first newsletters produced by the editor-in-chief, Edwin E. Slosson, were very much in line with the dry style of technical reporting that had become fashionable just a few decades earlier. Scripps recognized Slosson’s expertise but believed that “there is no better propaganda for science than the romantic facts of research and discovery” (Rhees). Accordingly, he encouraged Slosson and his writers to use eye-catching headlines while explaining scientific and technological developments in a tempered manner and to provide “human interest angles whenever possible [by] relating scientific concepts to everyday life” (Foust 61). He also encouraged them to capitalize on the popularity of scientific luminaries such as Albert Einstein and Marie Curie as a way of introducing their work to the public and to cast all scientists as intrepid pioneers who braved new frontiers for the betterment of humanity every day (Rhees). By thinking in terms of the mass audience for which they were writing, as well as the scientists they sought to represent, the writers of Science Service proved that science journalism could be both entertaining and informative.

  Anglophone women have participated in the practice of science popularization since the Enlightenment, so it is not surprising that they sought work as science journalists in the opening decades of the twentieth century.2 As a whole, journalism was relatively welcoming to women at this time. In 1901 9 percent of all American reporters were women, and by 1931 that number had risen to 17 percent (Franks 2). While many of these reporters wrote for society pages or women’s magazines, a few trailblazers made their names in sports, politics, investigative reporting, and, of course, science journalism.3

  In the first decade of its existence, Science Service hired half a dozen female reporters with “background[s] in science and a love of writing” (Tressider). Some of these women were formally trained in basic scientific subjects such as chemistry. Others were experts in the new social sciences (including anthropology, sociology, and psychology) that Scripps believed would be central to the future development of society (Rhees). Taken together, they were instrumental in changing popular perceptions of both science and women in science reporting.

  While the first generation of SF editors often addressed scientific and technological issues in their editorial columns, modern science journalism did not appear in SF magazines until the late 1930s, when a new generation of editors took over the genre’s major publications. It was particularly central to Amazing Stories and its sister publications under the leadership of Raymond A. Palmer, who was hired by Ziff-Davis in 1938 to resuscitate the then-failing franchise. Palmer, an active SF fan from the late 1920s who is credited as co-founder of the first SF fanzine, was delighted to take on the challenge: “Here at last I had the power to do to my old hobby what I had always had the driving desire to do to it. I had in my hands the power to change, to destroy, to create, to remake, at my own discretion” (qtd. in Nadis 31). Encouraged by his employers to target a young male audience, Palmer exchanged stories that were carefully extrapolated from current scientific and social trends for action-packed intergalactic romps; hired new artists to increase the sex appeal of Amazing’s covers; and replaced the “courtly and reserved” editorial tone set by his predecessor, the eighty-something T. O’Conor Sloane, with a “brash, silly, and chummy” one much like that of the fan community from which he came (Nadis 32). While longtime readers decried these changes, there was no doubt that they were successful. When Palmer took over Amazing, its circulation was below 40,000; within a decade he had increased it to 250,000 while founding the companion magazine Fantastic Adventures and laying the groundwork for a whole new cluster of paranormal publications.

  As he transformed Amazing Stories, Palmer transformed the way SF magazines presented science itself. Like E. W. Scripps, the Amazing founder Hugo Gernsback dreamed of bringing science to the masses in an accurate but easily digestible manner. Accordingly, he hired as many science and engineering PhD’s as possible to help shape his magazine. Sloane—a retired professor, inventor, and former Scientific American editor with a PhD in electrical engineering who wrote dozens of popular science books—was involved with Amazing Stories from its inception, beginning as Gernsback’s managing editor in 1928 and then assuming the role of editor just a year later (“T. O’Conor Sloane”). Sloane advocated the information model of science writing and began each issue of Amazing with a “long, thorough, but rather dull treatise on a topic such as the history of printing technology or the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere” (Nadis 30). Palmer transformed this opening column into a casual, entertainment-oriented affair where he speculated goofily about new scientific developments—wondering, for instance, “what a space explorer [in a new invention called ‘the space suit’] would do to scratch an itch” (Nadis 32). For Palmer, scientific and technological development might indeed be amazing, but it should be amusing as well, something that all intelligent people could play with in the laboratory of their minds.

  After doing away with the Victorian model of science writing embodied by Sloane, Palmer hired scores of writers to produce modern science journalism for Amazing, including everything from basic science filler material to one-shot science history essays to illustrated serial columns. While many of these new features were written along the lines of their mainstream counterparts, others were not. Palmer seems to have been particularly keen to upset what Rensberger calls the hierarchical “Gee-Whiz” model of science reporting, in which science journalists respectfully translate the complex ideas of godlike scientists for an equally respectful audience (1055). Instead, his formative experiences with a boisterous fan community confident in its own intellectual abilities led Palmer and his writers to challenge scientific authority just as often as they celebrated it. Furthermore, the editor’s interest in the occult and pseudoscience (combined, perhaps, with his love of a good joke) led him to publish a number of weird science pieces that encouraged readers to actively debate the relations of fact and fiction and science journalism versus science hoax.

  Palmer was well known for patronizing women writers and hired many as science journalists. When he began publishing science journalism in Amazing and Fantastic Adventures, about 10 percent of his science writers were women; by the time Palmer left Ziff-Davis in 1949, that number had risen to 25 percent. Moreover, two of the five most prolific science writers for his magazines were women. The first of these was L. Taylor Hansen, who produced sixty-two essays on anthropology and geology for Amazing Stories, fifty-five of which were featured in the lavishly illustrated “Scientific Mysteries” column. The second was Lynn Standish, who wrote forty-seven articles on a wide range of subjects and was the primary author associated with Amazing’s “Scientific Oddities” column in the 1940s and its “Facts of the Future” column in the 1950s.4