Old time science fiction and fantasy published in the 1930s and 40s, and yet at the time it was a departure from the norm. These stories have a strong emotional element rather than being based on the standard, strictly factual, 'big idea' of a lot of fiction of the period.

By today's standards the earlier ones in particular are rather purple prose in style, and there are some strange attitudes about women, considering that the author was a woman - the ending of Black God's Kiss being a real case in point - but there are also some very strong stand-out tales, especially in No Woman Born where the whole pivot of the story is the question of what makes us human, and Vintage Season a rather dark story about time travellers. Given the weaker and/or uncomfortable elements, an overall 3-star rating. ( )

The writing of C. L. Moore (Catherine Lucille Moore) was influenced by H.P. Lovecraft, the prince of the macabre in early twentieth century literature. Her own stories can be disturbing, as we will see, but they are also uniquely evocative of feelings and sensations.

The first story in “The Best of C.L. Moore,” is “Shambleau,” which appeared in the pulp magazine “Weird Tales” (a magazine to which Lovecraft also contributed) in November 1933, only a couple of months before Moore’s twenty-third birthday. It is about an adventurer named Northwest Smith, who became a recurring character in Moore’s short stories. In this inaugural tale, Smith rescues a strange alien girl from a mob only to find himself drawn into a weird and addictive, vampiric-sexual relationship.

In the only other Smith story included in this collection, “Black Thirst” (1934), Smith again becomes the near-victim of a psychic vampire, only this time things get bisexual as the male “vampire,” who has for centuries fed off the energy of beautiful women, reconsiders his options.

Another memorably creepy tale is “Black God’s Kiss,” published almost a year after “Shambleau.” Moore introduces her female adventure hero, Jirel of Joiry, a female knight with armor and sword. In this story, she must journey through a supernatural shadow land searching for a “weapon” to use against the man who has made her a prisoner in the ordinary world. Though exceptionally brave, she shudders as she dispatches with her sword ankle-biting creatures that splash her legs with their gore.

“The Bright Illusion” (1934) is another macabre tale that begins with a man dying in the Sahara Desert. He envisions a being that transports him to a distant planet where “people” are shaped like worms or snakes and have multiple sexes, though he is temporarily given the ability to see them in illusory human form (which simplifies the multi-gender issue by making some appear as male and others as female). Once again, Moore has a human falls for an alien, but this time it is real love – or is it?

Perhaps less successful are stories like “Tryst in Time” (1936) and “Greater Than Gods” (1939). The former follows an adventurer (not Smith) who travels to several different historical periods in quick succession and recognizes the same female soulmate in each scene.

In “Greater Than Gods,” Moore looks at alternate timelines, taking a bifurcated or many-worlds approach now reminiscent of the notions of physicists Erwin Schrödinger and Hugh Everett in the 1950s. In this story, a scientist is simultaneously contacted by his future progeny from two different timelines.

The seventh story in this collection, “Fruit of Knowledge” (1940), is characteristic of Moore in its exploration of feelings and sensations as it retells the story of Adam and Eve from the viewpoint of the ur-woman Lilith. Moore’s ability to handle strong female characters is on display here as elsewhere.

Moore wrote “No Woman Born” for “Astounding Science Fiction” in 1944, about a hybrid human-machine, created by putting the brain of a woman named Dierdre – whose body had been destroyed in a fire – into a robotic body. Is a cyborg still a human being? Maltzer, the scientist who “created” Dierdre in her new form, fears she will eventually drift away from identification with humanity, who might have difficulty accepting her in any case.

Next is a charming fantasy called “Daemon” (1946). The protagonist, a young Brazilian named Luiz, aka, “o Bobo” (the Simpleton), has always felt alien. After his grandmother died, he became homeless and eventually was shanghaied by an evil ship’s captain. The curious virtue of Luiz, aside from his profound innocence, is that he can see that everyone but himself has a “daemon,” which is an entity that can be either good or bad, but is attached to each person’s soul. Luiz feels sure that he himself has neither a soul nor a daemon. The worst example he has ever seen is Captain Stryker, who is completely evil and cruel. His daemon is a brilliant red – like a red devil – and seems to thrive on every act of evil that the captain commits.

Stryker maroons Luiz and a fellow passenger on a desert island. The passenger, known to Luiz as “the Shaughnessy,” tells him that there might be nymphs sharing the island with them, but he predicts that they will not appear until the Shaughnessy has died because they only appear to those who believe in them. After the Shaughnessy dies, the nymphs do appear to Luiz. Later, Stryker returns because the Irishman’s family is searching for him, and Stryker feels the need to eliminate loose ends, but a final showdown takes place when the captain meets the supernatural Master of the island.

Any discussion of “Vintage Season” (1946) unfortunately needs a spoiler because the fact that it involves time-travel is withheld until near the end. The main character, Oliver, spends much of the story trying to figure out where the people who have rented his house come from and why they seem unspecifiably “foreign.” The time-travelers are enjoined from telling any of the “natives” of Oliver's time period what is about to happen or to mention time-travel at all. This story holds up surprisingly well despite having been written seventy-four years ago.

This is a good if far from complete collection of Moore’s stories. She is a writer of magical if often creepy fiction in both the sci-fi and fantasy genres. ( )

These are short stories from the 1930s and 1940s, and are an amalgamation of fantasy and science fiction. They are well written and highly atmospheric. I found the following most memorable:
Black God's Kiss [Jirel of Joiry]
Black Thirst [Northwest Smith]
Shambleau [Northwest Smith]
No Woman Born
Tryst in Time
Vintage Season (a story about time-travel tourism) was definitely the highlight of the collection for me. ( )

To give this collection of Catherine Moore's fiction from 1933-1946 less than 4 stars would be a crime. Closer to 5. She is a pioneer of a woman writing in the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres. She also brought depth and a sensuality that was usually lacking in stories of that era. I have never read a bad story by her over the years and one of the stories in this book, the last one, 'Vintage Season' is a longtime favorite of mine. It is a strange story of travelers from the future visiting the past to witness disasters. It was made into a film starring Jeff Daniels in the early 90's. The opening story in here, “Shambleau” is certain to give you the creepy crawlies. It was the author's first sale and appeared in a 1933 issue of Weird Tales magazine. What a debut! Not a planetary romance, but a planetary nightmare.

The author had quite an imagination and there are some great stories here. Several of these have an element of 'horror' to them. That is not my go to genre but I had to admire the skill of these well written stories, artifacts from another age.

These are longer stories, novella or novelette length and so are richer in the story than a typical short story would be. Among the many good ones I especially enjoyed 'Fruit of Knowledge' a retelling of the Garden of Eden creation and fall of Man myth. I doubt I have ever read a story like this before that really brought the Garden of Eden, and Adam and ... surprise, Adam's first woman Lilith, to life.

The included material was:
Introduction: Forty Years of C. L. Moore • (1975) • essay by Lester del Rey
Shambleau • [Northwest Smith] • (Weird Tales, November 1933) • novelette
Black Thirst • [Northwest Smith] • (Weird Tales, April 1934) • novelette
The Bright Illusion • (Astounding Stories, October 1934) • shortstory
Black God's Kiss • [Jirel of Joiry] • (Weird Tales, October 1934) • novelette
Tryst in Time • (Astounding Stories, December 1936) • novelette
Greater Than Gods • (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939) • novelette
Fruit of Knowledge • (Unknown, October 1940) • novelette
No Woman Born • (Astounding Science Fiction, December 1944) • novelette
Daemon • (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1946) • shortstory
Vintage Season • (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1946) • novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
Afterword: Footnote to "Shambleau"... and Others • (1975) • essay by C. L. Moore ( )

I had heard of Catherine Lucille Moore, but this was my first exposure to her work. I saw this collection of her short stories come on sale on Amazon, so I decided to give it a try.

In my typical fashion for a short story collection, I’ll do a short review of each story, and then look at the collection as a whole.

Shambleau *****
Not only is this story my introduction to Moore’s work in general, it is my introduction to one of her most famous characters, Northwest Smith. N.W., as his partner-in-crime Yarol calls him, is very much the anti-hero. I call him an anti-hero insofar as he doesn’t particularly demonstrate the chivalry of other nearly contemporaneous characters like the Geste brothers. However, I think you could almost as accurately call him a hero, if the hero you have in mind is someone like Odysseus.

Northwest Smith is a pirate and a smuggler, a desperado of renown. Like Odysseus, he is cast adrift from his home. He definitely shoots first and then neglects to ask any questions. He is happy to lie to your face and then rob you blind. He is not, however, a force of random destruction, he just is wholly out for himself. In the pre-Christian moral universe of the Homeric Greeks, N. W. would have fit right in. However, he does not actually live in that moral universe, but in one whose foundation is Christianity, which is a thematic element we will return to later.

In addition, the story itself is a re-working of Greek legend, but with an eldritch horror element that feels quite natural here. Greek myth itself doesn’t have the existential dread of living in a universe that contains many things older than, more powerful than, and also indifferent at best to man, but it readily compatible with it. The Greek Gods were anthropomorphic, but often cruel and indifferent. However, the real monsters do not even rise to that level.

“Shambleau” uses the venerable conceit that old stories often contain a gem of truth. Stories in this vein treat their subjects as not at all metaphorical. With suspension of disbelief, such a story can be strange and frightening because you can imagine it to be mostly true. Many of my favorite authors have recycled myth and history to great effect, and Moore does an excellent job here. Even more remarkable, since this was her first commercial sale. “Shambleau” is one of the stories almost everyone talks about when speaking of C. L. Moore’s work, and I think it a remarkable piece. I can see why Moore had such a long career and so much influence on other authors.

Black Thirst ***
Whereas “Shambleau” had a touch of eldritch horror, “Black Thirst” is quite simply Lovecraftian. This is the second Northwest Smith tale, and in typical planetary romance fashion, it is set on a young and torrid Venus, whereas “Shambleau” was set on an old and dusty Mars.

This story gave off a pretty strong Tim Powers vibe for me. Powers’ early novel, Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, in particular. The antagonist of “Black Thirst”, the Alendar, has a likeness to Powers’ Norton Jaybush. Most of Powers’ protagonists are nothing like Northwest Smith however.

Unfortunately, while this possible connection is intriguing to me, I started to lose steam on the collection here. “Black Thirst” is very much in the vein of Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars. I liked the John Carter stories well enough, but not enough to read again, so I found more of the same unispiring. Not even the Lovecraftian element was good enough, since it was more of a mood than a repetition of Lovecraft’s peculiar way with words.

The Bright Illusion **
“The Bright Illusion” is the weakest story in this collection. I might actually have given up here, but I am glad that I did not. My best description of this is Lovecraft in spaaaace! It features a human coerced into serving as an agent in a titanic battle between two beings so great in power and majesty they are worshiped as gods, although they are nothing of the sort.

Except, this story ends on a curiously hopeful note, which in the hands of lesser author would have been merely schmaltzy. We get “Love conquers all” mixed up with “There are fates worse than death”, but I am most fascinated by the way in which this is used to illustrate the fundamental inadequacy of the victor of the titanic battle of the “gods”, who is forced to admit that the worst it can actually do is kill you.

This is curiously not like Lovecraft, and piqued my interest despite the overall weakness of the story compared to the rest.

Black Kiss *****
“Black Kiss” was the story that rescued the whole collection for me. It helped that I stumbled upon a recently written blog post, Fandom: An Illustrative History (Part I: Origins and Tales From the Crypt). This blog post illuminated Moore’s work in particular, and my love of science fiction in general.

The blog post has a lot of sci-fi inside baseball that need not detain us here, but this part stuck out to me:

The Gothic is the beating bloody heart in any good traditional romance story and is what gives it the universal core so needed in fiction. White against black. Dark against Light. Hero against Villain. Eternal Life against Endless Death. Temptation against Virtue. It goes beyond the surface into weighty themes of the Ultimate, God, and True Justice. The knowledge of a battle between forces beyond both parties at play that haunt the scenery and the overall world behind the story. It underpins every action and decision, and the thought that salvation or damnation is a stone throw away is the most nail-biting experience of them all. Now those are stakes, and they were an integral part of all fiction until the second half of the 20th century where the worst thing that can happen to you is that a monster might kill you in the dark where you can't see it.

The term romance, as used here and in my own musings above, echos the sense in which J. R. R. Tolkien insisted that The Lord of the Rings was a romance, by which he, and I, means a story of heroism and adventure and wonder. This was a development of the earlier chanson de geste, such as the Song of Roland. Not a bodice-ripper, although you might actually be confused if you search of images of Jirel of Joiry. I picked the one image I found that matched the story best.

The moral universe of Jirel is explicitly a Christian one. Defeated, and in extremis, Jirel seeks the possibility of a weapon beyond mortal ken in the bowels of her castle. She has previously explored the forbidden passage with her chaplain, but now she disregards his entirely sensible advice to turn back and she descends into a strikingly imagined Hell to exact vengeance. Jirel reaches a point where she can progress no further without discarding the Crucifix she wears about her neck. She proceeds.

I have no idea what Moore’s beliefs, or personal life, were really like. But at the distance of 85 years, what struck me was she simply assumed her readers would understand the peril in which Jirel was placing herself. If you don’t think there are fates worse than death, this story won’t make any sense at all. The stakes are not death, but damnation.

Jirel finds that which she seeks in that mysterious tunnel under her castle. But what we seek, and what we really want, often aren’t truly the same things. Moore’s denouement is so characteristically feminine that I don’t know how to properly do it justice, other than to say that the image I selected for this short story is simply perfect, and all the others are irrelevant cheesecake.

I am also almost certain that Tim Powers lifted parts of this story into his works, particularly The Drawing of the Dark. There is a scene in “Black Kiss” with a spiral tunnel that Jirel transits, and Powers wrote of a spiral staircase under a brewery in Vienna that his protagonist descended to seek power, claustrophobically close. Once I saw the similarity here, I couldn’t unsee it in other places too.

A Tryst in Time ***
A time travel/reincarnation/love story. I was impressed with how well Moore blended the masculine adventure elements with star-crossed lovers. Not exactly my thing, but well-imagined.

Greater than Gods ****
This short story feels to me like something written much later, for example Ballard’s work, with its elements of science run amok and managerial expertise turning into despotism. On the other hand, Heinlein’s first published story came out the same year as this, 1939, and Heinlein’s work is often similar to “Greater than Gods”.

Due to an accident in converging time streams, a scientist finds himself thrust upon the horns of a dilemma. In one future, his choice of a wife means that a pacifist, matriarchal, and quite stagnant society will occur. There is no more war, but no more technology or drive either, and that society’s grip on prosperity is slowly slipping away. In the other future, the other woman he is considering proposing to will bear him a son, who will beget a long line of sons who will dominate the Earth, and far, far beyond. This society is militaristic and regimented, but also capable of genuinely great things.

At this distance in time, I am fascinated by the dilemma Moore gives us. Today, no one could possibly propose this as a genuine dilemma in literature. I don’t think it could be done, because even I feel like maybe the peaceful but incompetent society is clearly better. However, the story makes no sense at all if you cannot truly feel that heroic deeds and exploring the universe and inventing new things are genuinely good things, which counterbalance the very very topical jingoism of this late 1930s tale.

Also, Moore superficially presents us with the thought that future history depends on whether each woman bears a daughter or a son first, but on another level, what really matters is the character of the mother, and what kind of child that union will create. I won’t spoil the choice the man makes in the end, which is what makes this story really transcendent.

Fruit of Knowledge *****
A dramatic retelling of the Fall of Man and the Temptation of Eve. Of Biblical stories, the sin of Adam and Eve retains popular currency even now, while other stories have begun to fade from our memories.

”Fruit of Knowledge” is perhaps a typical expression of the West in the twentieth century, insofar as the sin that truly separates Man from God is not simply disobedience, but sexual desire. On the other hand, if this story had been written today, Adam would have had sex with Lilith, not simply spoken to her and enjoyed her company for a brief time before the creation of Eve.

Like “Jirel of Joiry”, “Fruit of Knowledge” is set within a Christian moral universe. Moore sets the Fall shortly after the rebellion of Lucifer, an act which does not appear in the Hebrew tradition, but is instead from the Revelation to John. Also, there are hints that the Fall of Man was in some sense a happy accident, an event that was allowed to happen, because a greater destiny was in store. This is a speculation that goes back to Augustine of Hippo, so far as I know.

Finally, the children of Lilith, referenced by Moore here, were used by Tim Powers in his novels The Stress of Her Regard and Hide Me Among the Graves.

No Woman Born *****
Moore explicitly links this to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, through the dialogue of her characters. This is a tale of the creation of a monster by means of good intentions, and also truly terrifying to me.

Daemon ****
I think I can trace this short story to two Tim Powers novels. First, the setting, Atlantic sailing in the age of the buccaneers tinged with Vudun, is much like On Stranger Tides, the book that was optioned for Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Next, The Drawing of the Dark, Powers’ contribution to the Arthurian legend, which hinges upon the titanic change in the world wrought by the first Christmas.

No, three, because the influence of the Grait God Pan, who was the center of Powers’ Earthquake Weather.

This was a fantastic little story, from near the end of Moore’s career. Poignant and well-crafted, with acute psychological insight. Not as striking as “Shambleau”, but far better written.

Vintage Season ***
A sad tale of time-traveling voyeurism, but a well-executed one.

Ben’s final verdict *****
I almost gave up on this collection, but I am glad I didn’t. Moore wrote some great stories, of a kind I don’t think you can find anymore. I can’t find any interviews or essays where Powers talks about Moore, but after reading this, I have a hard time imagining he didn’t read her works and find inspiration in them. Highly recommended. ( )