As I continue to work my way through classic science fiction short story anthologies, The Best of CL Moore came up next. The books I borrowed (all at once and for an insanely long amount of time) are almost exclusively first editions from the Brooklyn Public Library. I’ve treated them tenderly. As I’ve gone through them, I’ve returned them one at a time. This round featured Catherine Moore’s radical empathy as the first woman to truly break into the modern science fiction world and dominate the awards ceremony for her radical stories.
C.L. Moore is the first in a long line of modern spec fic women writers who have resorted to initials, from her to J.K. Rowling and N.K. Jemisin and beyond. Sort of an unbroken line of feminists trying to set the stage for future women writers with their own brave work.
As Lester del Rey says, he was radically changed “back in the fall of 1933” when he “opened the November issue of Weird Tales to find a story with the provocative but meaningless title, ‘Shambleau,’ by an unknown writer named C.L. Moore.” The bleak, mechanistic, unemotional stories would never satisfy him again.
So he was there with 2,000 folks rising to their feet in ovation for the “lovely lady blushingly accepting the applause.”
Many in that audience had never read the story. But everyone knew about it. And everyone knew that Catherine Moore was one of the finest writers of all time in the field of science fiction.
— Lester del Rey, The Best of C. L. Moore
CL Moore: started early, and ended early.
She was twenty-two when she first published that story, employed as a bank secretary in Indianapolis. Apparently she’d written for fifteen years prior, submitting while sick. That places her beginning at the age of 7.
Wild.
But she met Henry Kuttner, also a youthful writer with a career ahead. Moved to NYC, married him, and for eighteen years they wrote furiously together until he died of a heart attack. Hers was sensitive and emotive; his intellectual and structural. They fused their talents and ended up with many co-authored tales, in several cases you can’t tell who had a hand in what.
Vintage Season is clearly her masterwork and this anthology should be read simply for that story.
Once Henry Kuttner died, she gave up writing science fiction and went on to write for Warner Bros. television, writing episodes of the westerns Sugarfoot, Maverick, and The Alaskans, as well as the detective series 77 Sunset Strip, all between 1958 and 1962. Once she married Thomas Reggie, she stopped writing entirely and only showed up to conventions.
She died of Alzheimers on April 4th, 1987 — twenty-three days before I was born.
Table of Contents for The Best of CL Moore
- Shambleau
- Black Thirst
- The Bright Illusion
- Black God’s Kiss
- Tryst in Time
- Greater Than Gods
- Fruit of Knowledge
- No Woman Born
- Daemon
- Vintage Season
- Footnote to Shambleau and Others
Shambleau
As the editor of the Of Gods and Globes series, I would have given a great deal to have been the first to publish the short story Shambleau. CL Moore takes a classic mythological horror (yes, one that shares an astronomical name), the classic arc of a damsel in distress romance, and the setting of a Scifi world navigated by a film noir detective. If there’s a prototype to something like Blade Runner, you’d find it here.
The story is unquestionably haunting for any male savior type out there or folks that have ever been attracted to the outcast of a given society. She manages to make the monster attractive and revolting at once, sort of a turn on and a horror that such a thing would ever attract you — or the main character. I’m honestly not quite sure how she manages it, to be frank. It’s almost as if she’s using trope “queues” of dating stories, but assigning them all wrong.
Black Thirst
Even more frightening is the CL Moore story Black Thirst, featuring again Northwest Smith. He comes face to face with more or less demonic-level super intelligences that feed, more or less, on the beauty of other creatures.
Only he has a beauty unlike the beautiful sirens who nearly drive him out of his mind. And that same thing might give him a way out of there. Well executed, though it didn’t haunt me as much as Shambleau.
The Bright Illusion
The Bright Illusion haunted me more than several of the others because, metaphysically, it seems much more plausible to me. That might sound odd for those who have read it — man meets a mirage of a golden egg in the desert and is persuaded by an interstellar demiurge to be his emissary to bring about the downfall of another demiurge in another dimension’s deep space.
It brings about questions of corporeal love between two creatures who are, otherwise, absolutely mind-numbingly horrified at the sight of one another.
Like the previous, it brings up brilliant questions of the nature of beauty, the nature of love, and the interplay between the two. Sort of a riff on the beauty and the beast motif, but on a cosmic level.
Black God’s Kiss
Black God’s Kiss by CL Moore continues this theme of love, beauty, and related themes. In this case, however, it’s centered on revenge. This one felt… Scottish? Like in a “My Hatfield and McCoy bloodline stretches back to the Isle of Man” kind of way. Also rather horrifying on multiple fronts, though… some of the plot mechanics are clunky. Like why is the portal to hell that you need to access conveniently located in the dungeon you’ve been exiled inside?
Anyways.
Basically a woman loses her lifelong love after a battle. She was a warrior princess, he a prince. And the conquering man forcibly kisses her. So she vows to murder him brutally by any means necessary.
Including going to hell to get a terrible metaphysical weapon from a demon.
This alone felt very, very wrong.
But anyways, other than the prison hole, it was fascinating to watch Catherine being about the pacing.
the ethics of it
The implied ethics, though, could only be written so well by a woman. It’s one thing to speculate in a philosophical context, another entirely to narrate them. For her ultimate ethic comes down to a reckoning that some sins are worse than even sexual violence — the kiss of her foe. For the weapon she uses brings him down and she realizes, with horror, that at his death there is no love nor attraction left for her in the world whatsoever.
And so what’s worse than minor sexual violence is vengeful murder with the help of demons. And she has to live now in a loveless, sexless world where only ugliness remains.
Quite the piece, I couldn’t have done it. Had I the chops, I doubt I’d have the courage. If I had the courage, I doubt I’d have the empathy and social margin. Had I those, I’d still be a man.
Tryst in Time
Tryst in Time is a weird piece, for me at least. It’s sort of a time traveller falling in love for the first time with an incessantly persecuted woman. I don’t know that I have much to say about this other than that the time traveling mechanic was certainly unique to me.
Greater Than Gods
Man I loved Greater Than Gods, though I had a headache most of the time reading it and did it on lunch breaks at Think Coffee near NYU — shortly before meeting the journalist David Van Biema.
(I’m going to start keeping track of that sort of thing more often; I’ll do this more for my archivist than for name dropping sake — it might be important to keep track of whom I met when, not so much for me, but because I’ve been a connector for folks long enough that this might grow more and more important).
In any case, this one featured a man who basically genetically engineered his own progeny to time travel back and argue at the same time with him over which of their timelines he should pursue. It all came down to which of his lab partners he should marry. The scientist was boring, but kept him focused on the task. The other was far more empathetic and lulled him by comfort.
The choice was rather unexpected right until the end. But it really showed the consequences of one’s love life with one’s job. I seldom wonder whether an author writes autobiographically, but I did start to wonder about the influences her romance with Kuttner offered for these stories in the midst of this one.
Fruit of Knowledge
Fruit of Knowledge, like George MacDonald’s Lilith, is a retelling of Adam’s first wife, Lilith. It’s a common trope taken up in fantasy (arguably in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles) and none did it so well as MacDonald.
I suppose what this adds, bearing a woman’s touch, is Lilith’s perspective as one of tragedy. A demon not considering the full weight of their own obsessions.
This, it seems to me, is truly unique and, when taken with the MacDonald piece, creates a robust image of grace.
No Woman Born
No Woman Born is contained in Science Fiction 101 (formerly Worlds of Wonder) by Robert Silverberg. Since I’m finishing that one up and will write about it soon, I’ll save most of my comments on this story for that bit. But I do want to say that it really tinkers with the idea of engineering superpowers and the danger that does to a mind trapped within.
It is also very — all of these and most of science fiction is very — Cartesian Dualism. Brain in a vat, brain body, body soul, etc. I’ve read enough of the modern philosophers of the mind and others to know that’s now how things actually work, so it kind of works as this constant irritant.
I suppose having your own ideas, though, is indication that you have something to say. Hopefully I can say it well when the time comes.
The specific construction of the cyborg (we can call her that here?) is both beautiful and disturbing.
Daemon
Dunno if I was just bored by the time this one came along or what, but by this time I noticed a weakness all of these stories share: onboarding syndrome. It happens sometimes when folks get paid by the word, but it seems to me she could have gotten to the central problem in half the time with most of these and it would have worked just as well. That’s ESPECIALLY true of Daemon, though the idea was fascinating:
All of the pagan deities since Christendom are exiled to one island. Cute, in a way.
Vintage Season
Vintage Season seems to me to be the most original of the whole set. I know absolutely nothing like this story. I really don’t want to spoil it other than to say it involves a man trying to sell a house with very, very odd cultural squatters stuck inside who won’t leave. It was a slow boil, but my favorite of the set of extremely strong, obviously genre-defining short works of fantasy and science fiction.
Footnote to Shambleau and Others
Some of the best writing advice comes from this section. She says quickly where she gets her ideas for fiction:
- “First you have to read a great deal of the works you enjoy most.”
- Pick up names from your surroundings as often as meanings.
- Create foils for each character.
- Find human solutions with technological uniqueness.
- Cling to encouragement when you find it. And reinvest your profits.
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