Skulls in the Stars

Yet another post of invisibility fiction, driven by all the stories I found while researching my invisibility book!

Here we have a curious case: an invisibility story written by a lawyer-turned-author, Arthur Leo Zagat (1896-1949)! Zagat wrote for many pulp magazines, and published one novel, Seven Out of Time, that was released the year of his death. But let’s look at his invisibility story, “Beyond the Spectrum,” which appeared in the August 1934 issue of Astounding Stories.

This particular story doesn’t do much of anything that hasn’t been done by other tales, but does introduce a race of invisible monsters that seem very Lovecraftian!

Okay, this story seemed at first to be a pretty silly and stupid invisibility tale, but it leads down a fascinating historical rabbit hole. So follow along…

The setting: the city, late at night. A young couple in love are walking to the subway after leaving a party, when a voice from the shadows says, “Stick ’em up!” A robber, at gunpoint, demands their valuables.

After a hopeless glance up and down the street, the young man gave up his wallet, watch and gold stick­pin. The girl was forced to give her pocketbook, ear­rings and silver bracelets. She fumbled nervously. Impatiently, the gunman clutched at the locket around her neck.

“Oh, not that!” gasped the girl. ”I’ve had it all my life-please-“

“Shut up!” growled the bandit. “I take what I want. I’ll 1have that locket, too-“

Does this scene sound familiar? You might be thinking that a young Bruce…

Continuing my run of stories of invisibility to celebrate finishing the draft of my book on the history and physics of invisibility! I probably should’ve waited to do this until my book is actually out… ah, well.

With so many invisibility stories having been written, it was inevitable that I would come across one that seems like a re-run of earlier classics. Such is the case with “Beyond Power of Man,” by Paul Ernst, which appeared in the December 1928 issue of Weird Tales!

This story seems like a striking mishmash of several classic stories about invisibility! Let’s take a look.

Yet another invisibility story! So many invisibility stories.

So, in the list of stories we’ve looked at so far, we’ve seen invisible people, invisible monsters, invisible buildings, invisible cars, invisible dogs, and invisible spacecraft. But you now what we haven’t seen yet? Invisible robots!

Our invisible robots appear in Harl Vincent’s “Terrors Unseen,” which appeared in the March 1931 issue of Astounding Stories. It is not a particularly astounding story, but it does has invisible robots, so let’s take a look!

I keep finding new invisibility stories! Will I ever come to an end? Stay tuned!

It is pretty clear at this point that stories about invisibility were a huge business in the early to mid 20th century, and every author of science fiction or horror had to get in on the action in some way or another.

For example, I just had to type “Edmond Hamilton” and “invisibility” into a search bar and found Edmond Hamilton’s “The Invisible Master,” that appeared in Scientific Detective Monthly in the April, 1930 issue.

Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977) is another one of those super-prolific science fiction authors who had a huge influence on the field but isn’t broadly recognized like an Asimov, Bradbury or Clarke. I would be hard-pressed to single out a particular story of his that everyone would know, but I’m particularly fond…

Yet another post about invisibility in fiction! So many stories I couldn’t mention in my upcoming book on the physics of invisibility, so you get to hear about the stories here.

Time to talk about a real classic of science fiction that also happens to be a classic story about invisibility: War with the Gizmos, by Murray Leinster, first published in 1958.

Murray Leinster (1896-1975) was a stunningly prolific author of science fiction. The bibliography of his work on Wikipedia, which I am sure is not complete, includes dozens of novels alone. War with the Gizmos is a compelling story of an attack on humanity by an utterly unfamiliar species of beings, who may or may not be intelligent and may or may not be from another world. It also features a rather distinct form of invisibility; let’s take a look!

Yet another post about invisibility in fiction! Will I ever run out of these? I feel like I need to write another book just about invisibility fiction.

So in my last post, I wrote about “Invisible Death”, which appeared in the January 1930 issue of Astounding Stories of Super-Science. On a whim, I happened to browse the rest of the stories, and found another story about invisibility in that same issue. Clearly invisibility was a hot topic in that era.

The new story I found is titled “The Cave of Horror,” by Captain S.P. Meek.

It is a mixture of horror, action, and science fiction, and features run-ins with an invisible monster that has wandered up from the bowels of the earth and is now haunting Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky!