The Monster-God of Mamurth, by Edmond Hamilton

Posted on April 10, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Tomorrow is the day! Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen will be officially released in hardback and e-book! Audio book I believe is coming soon! Here’s a discussion of another classic story of invisibility…

We have run into a few authors who made it a bit of a career to write stories about invisibility, including Captain S.P. Meek, who wrote “The Attack From Space” and “The Cave of Horror,” as well as Victor Rousseau, who wrote “The Invisible Death” and The Sea Demons. We may also add Edmond Hamilton, who wrote “Valley of Invisible Men” that I’ve blogged about previously, but also whose very first science fiction story was “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” published in August of 1926 in Weird Tales!

Hamilton became an incredibly prolific writer for Weird Tales, joining H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as regulars, and branched out into other magazines and genres over his productive career. And it all started with an invisibility story!

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Invisible Death, by Anthony Pelcher

Posted on April 10, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Tick-tock! My book Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen, will be released tomorrow! Here’s another classic blog post of mine about invisibility in fiction, and I’ll share a new post later tonight!

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Back into some posts about invisibility in fiction, based on those stories that I didn’t talk about in my (hopefully) upcoming book about the history and physics of invisibility!

If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you might think that I made a mistake and have reposted something that I posted last week! Because didn’t I just write a post about “The Invisible Death“?

Well, I did, but that was “The Invisible Death,” by Victor Rousseau, which appeared in Astounding Stories of Super-Science in October, 1930, but now we’re talking about “Invisible Death,” which appeared in Astounding Stories of Super-Science in January, 1930!

If you’re confused, well, so was I: I stumbled upon Pelcher’s story while looking for Rousseau’s, but more on that later. Let’s talk about the story and the science of “Invisible Death”!

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The Elixir of Invisibility, by Henry Kuttner

Posted on April 9, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Two days until my book on the history and science of invisibility is released! To celebrate, here’s another reblog of a post on a classic invisibility story in fiction.

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Yet another post about a story of invisibility. I keep finding more for my book bibliography, so I might as well blog about them here!

Invisibility has been a key feature of stories in pretty much every genre of writing. Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” for instance, is pretty much a straight horror tale. H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man is, of course, classic and even foundational science fiction, and tales like D.W. Hall’s “Raiders Invisible” are really straight up adventure fiction. Invisibility has even been used in romance; the 1895 novel Stella by C.H. Hinton tells the tale of a man who falls in love with a woman who has been turned invisible! (It’s not a very good story, IMHO.)

So it is not surprising to find invisibility used in comedy stories as well, and such is the case with Henry Kuttner’s “The Elixir of…

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In the Walls of Eryx, by H.P. Lovecraft and Kenneth J. Sterling

Posted on April 8, 2023 by skullsinthestars

A post about another invisibility science fiction story, in anticipation of the release of my non-fiction book Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen!

When I started researching invisibility stories, I was not only surprised by the number of stories out there that I was unaware of, but was also amazed by the number of stories that focus on the concept of invisible buildings! I haven’t written about any of these yet, but they include “The Monster God of Mamurth,” by Edmond Hamilton (1926), and “The Invisible City,” by Clark Ashton Smith (1932). Honorable mention should also be given to “The Invisible Man Murder Case” by Henry Slesar (1958), which doesn’t have an invisible building but suggests that one application of invisibility could be making unsightly buildings invisible.

The most famous of this category of tales, however, is probably “In the Walls of Eryx,” written by H.P. Lovecraft and Kenneth J. Sterling and finally published in 1939.

I only recently learned that this story was technically co-authored. Most collections in which I have seen the story tend to credit Lovecraft alone, though the story was published with Sterling as a coauthor. Lovecraft often helped ghost-write stories for authors hoping to break into the magazine market, and “In the Walls of Eryx” is one of those collaborations. Kenneth Sterling was a high-school student who sent Lovecraft a draft of a story about an invisible maze, inspired by the aforementioned Hamilton story “Monster-God of Mamurth.” The original draft was lost, but it is assumed that Lovecraft extensively rewrote it, as the prose of the tale is very much unmistakably his.

The story was rejected by most publications during Lovecraft’s lifetime, and was only published posthumously by Weird Tales two years after his death.

Story spoilers follow, so if you’ve never read the story before, you can read it here.

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Raiders Invisible, by D.W. Hall

Posted on April 7, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Four days until the official release of Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen! Here’s another reblog of a post about classic science fiction invisibility.

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I am losing my mind.

So: in the process of tracking down Rousseau’s The Invisible Death a few days ago, I learned that there is another story about invisibility, with almost the exact same name, Invisible Death, that appeared in the same magazine, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, earlier in the same year but by a different author, Anthony Pelcher. Rousseau’s tale appeared in the October 1930 issue; Pelcher’s appeared in the January 1930 issue.

Let me describe what happened next using my tweets:

The story I’m referring to will appear in yet another upcoming post! But then, I got curious, and started browsing more issues of Astounding, and…

And I kept looking, and it just kept getting worse!

So, to recap: while researching one invisibility story, I managed to find four more!

The moral of the story is that I’m somehow even more behind in my blogging…

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The Invisible Death, by Victor Rousseau

Posted on April 6, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Five days until my book Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen is released! Here’s another classic blog post I did about invisibility in science fiction.

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Will I ever run out of vintage science fiction stories about invisibility to write about? I hope so, because otherwise my book draft will never be polished off.

Some authors of weird fiction seem to be addicted to invisibility. One notable example is H.P. Lovecraft, who published The Dunwich Horror in 1929 and In the Walls of Eryx in 1936, together with Kenneth Sterling. The former story is about an invisible monster that is released upon the unsuspecting town of Dunwich, and the latter is a science fiction story about an invisible maze on the planet Venus and the prospector who gets trapped within it due to his greed.

Another notable example of an invisibility addict is Victor Rousseau. Only days ago I wrote about his 1916 novel The Sea Demons, about a race of invisible aquatic humanoids who plan to rise up and conquer the surface world. Yesterday…

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Invisibility is an April 2023 must-read book for NBIC!

Posted on April 5, 2023 by skullsinthestars

I learned about this a few weeks ago, but forgot to post about it here! My upcoming book on Invisibility was selected as a “must-read book” for April 2023 for The Next Big Idea Club!

The Next Big Idea Club is a membership club that focuses on bringing the most interesting new non-fiction books every year to its audience. To quote from their page:

We are all hit by a tsunami of content options every day – never in human history has there been so much to read, watch, forward, swipe and winky-face. Over 600,000 new books are published every year. On YouTube, 300 new hours of video are uploaded every second. Where do you even start?

At the Next Big Idea Club, we believe you start with the people behind the ideas : writers, both established and up-and-coming, who engage, inspire, and motivate readers to make changes in their lives and the world.

Neuroscientists, historians, biologists, economists, journalists, psychologists, entrepreneurs … Next Big Idea Club authors come from a wide range of backgrounds. What they all share is a love of discovery, of investigation and exploration, and equally important, a love of communicating their stories and insights in entertaining, memorable ways.

So do we. We are believers – we think that the right book, the right speech, the right new habit, the right insight on what makes us tick, the right cautionary tale or clarion call or I-just-can’t-take-it-anymore rant — even the right tidying tip — at the right moment, can be life-changing.

Our goal is to make sure that everyone has access to these transformative ideas, and to nurture a community to discuss and build upon those ideas—both with each other and directly with the authors themselves.

I am very excited and honored to be chosen! I recorded some short audio files for the club to hit some of the key insights of the book, and am delighted that my book is being recognized in this way. I’m looking forward to everyone getting a chance to read this book.

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Slan, by A.E. van Vogt

Posted on April 5, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Less than a week before the release of my book on the history and science of invisibility! Here is another reblog of classic science fiction invisibility to celebrate…

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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…

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The Shadow of the Beast, by Robert E. Howard

Posted on April 3, 2023 by skullsinthestars

Just 8 days left until the release of my book on the history and physics of Invisibility! Here’s another post about a classic invisibility story, this one more of supernatural horror…

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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…

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Valley of Invisible Men, by Edmond Hamilton

Posted on April 2, 2023 by skullsinthestars

My upcoming book on Invisibility includes an Invisibibliography of all the invisibility stories I found before finishing the draft. As the following story indicates, there are still more to be found…

I am amazed that I can still find even more science fiction and horror stories about invisibility, even after I’ve researched for hours! My most recent discovery is “Valley of Invisible Men,” by Edmond Hamilton, that appeared in the March 1939 issue of Amazing Stories. The lead pages of the story are shown below.

This story is a rather standard “lost world” type adventure, where a daring protagonist ventures into dangerous unexplored lands, meeting hostile natives, falling in love, and encountering lost technology!

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