Skulls in the Stars

Yet another story that features the physics of invisibility, continuing my series of posts inspired by the research into my upcoming book on the history of invisibility physics!

A secret race of mutant humans, gifted with superpowers, hides out from the bulk of humanity that hates and fears them and seeks to exterminate them utterly.

If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of the classic Marvel comics series X-Men, but in this case I’m referring to the much earlier novel by A.E. van Vogt, Slan, first published in serial form in 1940 and then made into a book in 1946. (Image from the contemporary edition that I read.)

Slan is a classic of science fiction, and A.E. van Vogt’s first novel. Like many serialized stories of the time, it is a fast-paced tale with lots of twists and turns (and things that don’t completely makes sense if you…

Another post about an invisibility story, from my researching into my book on invisibility physics.

Sometimes a little bit of bad luck can turn into some good luck. To fill out my bibliography on invisibility fiction, I wanted to include The Shadow of the Beast, a thrilling little story by Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the barbarian and author who inspired the title of this blog. However, I realized that I had apparently given away my one REH book that includes The Shadow of the Beast (TSB), which turns out to be quite a rarity in the Howard oeuvre.

TSB was one of REH’s early stories, and was unpublished in his lifetime. In fact, it was first published in a chapbook that was published in 1977, and was copyrighted that same year, meaning that unlike other REH stories, it is not in the public domain, and hasn’t been…

Continuing a discussion of odd stories of invisibility in fiction that I came across in writing my book on the history of invisibility physics.

Pulp stories are sometimes quite a ride. They can be filled with bizarre ideas and twists and turns that are often largely nonsensical, tailored to bring people back to read what happens in the next issue.

One spectacular example of this is The Sea Demons, by Victor Rousseau Emanuel, first serialized in All Story Weekly starting in January of 1916 and then published as a novel in 1924. In August of this year, Armchair Fiction released a reprint of this otherwise hard to find novel:

This book is a wild ride and, relevant to my interest, features an undersea species of near-invisible humanoids, who threaten to destroy the surface world!