Skulls in the Stars

More invisibility! More invisibility fiction for the gods of invisibility fiction! Or something. Again, blogging about all the invisibility stories I’ve been coming across while finishing my book on invisibility physics.

It seems that pretty much every important author of science fiction and horror has written a story about invisibility at some point. One really just has to google a famous name and the word “invisibility” and see what comes up.

For example, one of my more recent discoveries is “The Little Man Who Wasn’t All There,” by Robert Bloch, published in the August, 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

Robert Bloch was a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft’s when he was young, and he went on to have his own impressive career as an author of horror. His most famous tale is Psycho (1959), which was adapted into the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name.

“The Little Man Who Wasn’t All There” is one of a series of semi-comedic tall tale type stories narrated by the character Lefty Feep. Bloch wrote 22 of these stories between 1942 and 1946.

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 Invisibility,” published in Fantastic Adventures in October 1940.

Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) was a versatile professional author for the pulp magazines who could write equally well in science fiction, fantasy, horror, or thriller. He really does seem to be the sort of author who was good enough to write “on demand” fiction for whatever an editor might need. And many of his stories are very, very good: the story “Private Eye,” written in 1949 under the pseudonym of Lewis Padgett which Kuttner often use in projects with his wife C.L. Moore, is one of my favorite science fiction stories of all time. In the future, scientists have developed the ability to look back at any moment in time. This would seem to make murder impossible to get away with, but one man, seeking revenge on a romantic rival, hatches a plan for the perfect murder even under 100% surveillance.

I’ll come back to “Private Eye” in another post, because now I really want to read it again! But what can we say about “The Elixir of Invisibility”?