Skulls in the Stars

More invisibility? Okay, sure, why not.

I may be cursed to blog about invisibility in fiction for the rest of my life. While preparing a post about McGivern’s “The Visible Invisible Man,” I suddenly realized that there is another story about invisibility in the very same issue of Amazing Stories!

As you can see from the short description, “Priestess of the Moon,” by Ray Cummings, features a woman fighting against an invisible being before disappearing herself. It is in fact another invisibility story, and quite frankly a very silly one. Let’s take a look… spoilers again, though I don’t think anyone will be particularly upset in the case of this story.

Here’s another invisibility story — again, my book on the history and physics of invisibility will be out next year!

The last we saw of William P. McGivern was his story “The Chameleon Man,” published in January of 1942. But it turns out that this wasn’t McGivern’s first invisibility story! That honor (presumably — he might still have an early one) goes to “The Visible Invisible Man,” published in the December 1940 issue of Amazing Stories.

Like McGivern’s later story, “The Visible Invisible Man” is also a comedy. I found it much more effective than the later one, though. You can read it here before reading my post if you want.

This is the last of my daily run of blog posts for now, marking the 30th post in a row! Most of them have been on invisibility in fiction, and we wrap with a fascinating example. I’ve still got more invisibility to post, but I won’t try to do them every day…

Is there a word for finding the correct thing by mistake? That is basically what happened with the next story of invisibility to discuss, “Cloak of Aesir,” by Don A. Stuart, published in the March 1939 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction.

So why was I mistaken? Well, here’s the description of “Cloak of Aesir” from the table of contents:

A man and the Sarn-Mother and a cloak of blackness— and the old Sarn-Mothcr couldn’t hate that human enemy!

The description of the “cloak of blackness” is what caught my attention, as it certainly sounds like something invisible-y! In…

The penultimate post on invisibility in fiction in my attempt to blog 30 days in a row! I’ve got more stories to blog after that, but this will probably be the end of my continuous run.

So we’ve technically already had one story about an actual “Invisible World,” but Ed Earl Repp’s story clearly didn’t go far enough — the world itself wasn’t invisible, it just had an atmosphere that guided light around it, acting like a cloaking device. But what if the entire planet, and everything on it, were perfectly invisible? That’s the story in Thorne Lee’s “Ghost Planet,” which appeared in the June 1943 issue of Startling Stories:

Getting close to the end of my run of invisibility in fiction posts! Hope you’ve been enjoying them!

Here we take a quick look at a story by one of my favorite weird fiction authors: Abraham Merritt, who went by A. Merritt in most of his printed work. The story in question is “The People of the Pit,” which first appeared in the All-Story Weekly Magazine in January of 1918; it can be read here. I happened across a reprint that appeared in the first Amazing Stories Annual, published in 1927.

A. Merritt would regularly include invisibility in his fiction. In his 1923 The Face in the Abyss, he introduced invisible winged serpents that effectively had cloaking devices to make themselves invisible. In his 1932 Dwellers in the Mirage he introduced an entire invisible city hidden in a valley protected by a mirage.