Valley of Pretenders. John Russell Fearn

fed up when my closest friend, the redoubtable dynamo known as Fearn, slanted my ideas towards science fiction. I’d read several odd tons of the stuff and I must confess it had appealed to me quite a lot. I thought there was nothing to lose by having a shot at it—but oh! Those first efforts were pretty awful, My brains, what there are of them, revolved around queer asteroids, men down in the sea, talking protoplasm, and other things usually associated with over-indulgence in opium or heavy cheese late at night.

      “About that time Stanley G. Weinbaum was at his peak. Everybody was nuts about his particular slant and so, being a trier, I imitated his style and produced Jo, the ammonia man of the planet Jupiter. This was in the yarn ‘Penal World’ published in Astounding, in 1937. Shortly afterwards I followed it up with a similar type of yarn called ‘Whispering Satellite,’ also in Astounding. On that point my activities with Astounding terminated because everybody was going like Weinbaum and the Editor was plenty sick. Campbell wrote me an explanatory letter and suggested changes of style.

      “I chewed things over. The science fiction business was getting a hold on me, and imitation would not do any longer. Why not try the other extreme and find out what had not been done? I felt I had got something there. Well, what hadn’t been done? Mystery!

      “Mystery! Of course! So far as I could figure out all the yarns were more or less straight experiments, adventures, theories—or, very rarely—a detective sort of problem. But what about a real juicy mystery woven round with science? Something to explain Mars, for instance, as it had never been explained before?

      “So I launched on a style which, I have since found, was unique. I unwittingly brought webwork plots into science fiction with my initial yarn in a new style—’Locked City.’ The praise for that one made me all of a benevolent glow and produced ‘Secret of the Ring’ (which I shall always privately regard as the best yarn I’ve written so far).”

      Fearn’s initial stratagem to write stories as Polton Cross in imitation of Weinbaum (who had died in December 1935) would almost certainly have been suggested to him by his U.S. agent, Julius Schwartz. So when shortly thereafter ‘Thornton Ayre’ followed suit, Schwartz would have been quite happy about it.

      Schwartz, in fact, had been Weinbaum’s agent, and in 1937 he was also representing many of the most prolific and successful American authors. It was surely no coincidence that many of those in his stable all began to write Weinbaum imitations at about the same time.

      In his introduction, “The Wonder of Weinbaum” in the landmark Weinbaum collection, A Martian Odyssey (Lancer, 1962) the leading SF historian Sam Moskowitz outlined just how celebrated and influential Weinbaum’s short career (1934-35, with posthumous stories in the next few years) had been:

      “Many devotees of science fiction sincerely believe that the true beginning of modern science fiction with it emphasis on polished writing, otherworldly psychology, philosophy and stronger characterization began with Stanley G. Weinbaum. Certainly few authors in this branch of literature have exercised a more obvious and persuasive influence on the attitudes of his contemporaries and through them on the states of the readers.…

      “…what cannot be argued away are the strong influences of Weinbaum to be found in the work of authors as outstanding in science fiction as Henry Kuttner, Eric Frank Russell, Philip Jose Farmer and Clifford D. Simak specifically.”

      The full roll call of other authors following in his footsteps is even longer, including, amongst others, Arthur K. Barnes, Eando Binder, Moskowitz himself, and not least John Russell Fearn.

      Their borrowings involved not just the stories themselves, but Weinbaum’s astronomical backcloth to his stories. This useful framework was astutely identified by Isaac Asimov in his brilliant introduction to The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum (Del Rey, 1974):

      “Weinbaum had a consistent picture of the solar system (his stories never went beyond Pluto) that was astronomically correct in terms of the knowledge of the mid-1930s. He could not be wiser than his time, however, so he gave Venus a day-side and a night-side, and Mars an only moderately thin atmosphere and canals. He also took the chance (though the theory was already pretty well knocked out at the time) of making the outer planets hot rather than cold so that the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn could be habitable.

      “On each of the worlds he deals with, then, he allows for the astronomic difference and creates a world of life adapted to the circumstances of that world.”

      These two new Fearn collections present all of the Weinbaum pastiches that Fearn published—a dozen in total. And, as a bonus, the second volume also contains a thirteenth story, “Locked City” by Thornton Ayre, his first story marking the radical new direction Fearn was to take when he abandoned the Weinbaum slant. Each story is annotated with further sidelights, setting the stories in the context of the science fiction magazine scene in the late 1930s and early 1940s, one of its most interesting and dynamic periods.

      I hope you will enjoy reading these stories as much as I did compiling them…and that they may intrigue you enough to want to seek out Weinbaum’s own stories if you have not already encountered them.

      —Philip Harbottle,

      Wallsend, England, July 2012

      VALLEY OF PRETENDERS

      BY DENNIS CLIVE

      From Science Fiction, March 1939

      Commenting on the magazine’s first issue in a letter in the June 1939 issue of Science Fiction, reader Garfield Hoffman lauded “Valley of Pretenders” by Dennis Clive as a “brilliantly outstanding tale among ten splendid yarns,” with “a dash of humanness, of realism that imparts to [its] bizarre setting a convincing smack of the authentic.…”

      An editorial note in the magazine’s next issue revealed that “Valley of the Pretenders” had been adjudged the most popular story by the readers’ response. Something that no doubt prompted its choice to lead off the publisher’s booklet reprint series of Science Fiction Classics in 1941. Fearn’s later ‘Clive’ novelette, “The Voice Commands”(Science Fiction January 1940), a non-Weinbaim story, was also included in this six-booklet reprint series. Both are now valuable collectors’ items and, technically, Fearn’s first ‘book’ editions. [Note for trivia fiends! The booklet has a printer’s error, transposing a paragraph from Chapter III to Chapter IV. This reprinting, taken from the magazine version, corrects the booklet’s error.]

      A good deal of this story was later incorporated—revised—in one of Fearn’s “fix-up” Vargo Statten novels, The Eclipse Express (Scion, 1952). The novel also incorporated a revision of another story from around this same period, “Eclipse Bears Witness” (Science Fiction, March 1940, as by Ephriam Winiki.)

      VALLEY OF PRETENDERS

      Great is the dismay of Mart and Eda when they find themselves trapped on a cruel moon-world—how can they hope for rescue now that the giant spaceship has risen into the void?

      Those four wandering Earth people soon regret leaving the vicinity of the spaceship—for they find themselves the captives of the strangest race of creatures ever to inhabit a world of the Solar System!

      CHAPTER I

      “Hell, that’s darned funny!” Mart Latham sat up in his comfortably sprung seat and stared in surprise through the huge window. “Look, we’re turning towards Rhea.… Rhea of all places!” he whistled blankly.

      He was not the only one who had noticed the fact. A general chatter of surprised conversation rose from the passengers in the immense, comfortable lounge. Faces angled towards windows in complete amazement.

      “Nothing to worry about, folks. Just keep your seats, please.”

      A trim, white-coated steward of the giant Earth-Europa space liner suddenly appeared at the main door. He was smiling apologetically.

      “We’ve developed a jet fault,” he explained. “It’s too risky to attempt the complete run to Earth without having it fixed—so we’re making a temporary landing on Rhea. We’ll be there about four hours—”