Skulls in the Stars

As long as I’ve been having fun tracking down classic science fiction stories that I absolutely love, let me share at least one more! “The Little Black Bag,” by C.M. Kornbluth, first appeared in the July 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. (You can read it on the Archive at this link.)

Cyril M. Kornbluth is one of my favorite science fiction authors, and largely due to three stories, that encapsulate a truly prescient view of the future and an extremely cynical one. In his story “The Silly Season” (1950), strange and nonsensical events worldwide that take up the attention of the newspapers turn out to be a distraction for an alien invasion. This story really anticipates the “noise chambers” that a lot of media companies have become, harping on nonsense issues to distract from serious ones. In his story “The Only Thing We Learn” (1949), a teacher recounts to students the heroic origins of their civilized society, whereas flashbacks show us the horror and brutality that those founders actually achieved. This story warns against the whitewashing of our history, while cynically suggesting that it will repeat itself with another conqueror.

The third story is “The Little Black Bag.” (Severe spoilers from here on out, so please read it first from the link.)

In my investigations of classic pulp magazines over the past year, I’ve come across some classic stories and real gems that I had forgotten about. One of these guilty pleasures is “Giants From Eternity,” by Manly Wade Wellman, published in the July 1939 issue of Startling Stories.

I’m a big fan of Manly Wade Wellman’s work; his Silver John series of stories and novels, about a wandering Appalachian minstrel who fights evil with wit and a song, are absolutely delightful. With his son, he wrote a story about Sherlock Holmes squaring off against H.G. Wells’ invaders from The War of the Worlds! I’ve also written about Giants From Eternity before, when I read it in a modern edition, though I read it and blogged about it over a decade ago!

Digging up the story in magazine form gives me an excuse to take another look at the story, and share the original images from the magazine! (And once you know what the story is about, you’ll see why.) If you want to read it in advance, the issue is available on the Internet Archive, or you can buy a modern edition.

Oh, what the heck — as long as I’m thinking of Algis Budrys’ work, and I’m still on a blogging roll, let me say a few words about his most famous novel Rogue Moon (1960). I read it on a Kindle on a trip a few years ago, which is why I suppose I never got around to blogging it — by the time I returned from the trip, I was already reading other things.

But Rogue Moon is a classic of science fiction, and well worth exploring. However, readers may find that the novel is not exactly about what it seems to be about at first glance!

Some time ago, I read Rogue Moon (1960), by Algis Budrys, a classic science fiction novel about an alien deathtrap maze discovered on the moon and the man willing to die over and over again to discover its secrets. I found it fascinating, even though for some reason I never blogged about it. I’ve thought about looking up more of Budrys’ work, and after recently rereading his invisibility-related story “For Love,” I decided to give Hard Landing (1993) a try.

Hard Landing is a very unusual but compelling novel — it tells the story of alien explorers from another solar system who crash land on Earth and are forced to “go native,” and the ways they go about it.